Juddson:
Hello. Red Bull gives you wings.
Juddson:
That is for our new sponsorship that I hope to obtain from Red Bull. So today with us is someone who doesn’t like Red Bull, which doesn’t help my campaign here. We have Melissa Berrie and Melissa is a lead instructor for Texas EMS school.
Juddson:
She is a paramedic and she is a big proponent and supporter of mental health awareness in the first responder community. I thought, you know, it’s Suicide Awareness Month, we need to talk about that before the month ends so we can put some notice on it because it’s something we usually avoid discussing in the first responder world.
Juddson:
So Melissa, thank you for coming today.
Melissa:
Thanks for having me.
Juddson:
You’re welcome. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and bring it around to how you got into EMS and ended up here.
Melissa:
Oh, wow. Well, I never wanted to be an EMS, so I’ll be honest: it is something that just happened.
Melissa:
I believe that God put you on a path, and you will end up there because it will bring him glory one day. But I had a little girl a little too early, and her lungs collapsed shortly after birth. They told me she wouldn’t make it where we had her in San Angelo.
Melissa:
So we flew her to Fort Worth, and she coded three times in flight. They took her to Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth. And I gave consent over the cell phone for life support for Mikayla. She wasn’t going to make it. She wasn’t going to be alive by the time I got to her.
Melissa:
And so they put her on a machine called EgMO for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. At that time, I was a housewife. I had a four-year old with me. But I didn’t have any medical knowledge, and I was afraid of this new baby. Mikayla ended up making it. She’ll be 26 on the 30th. She’s given me a grandson.
Melissa:
I like him more than I like her. But it’s one of those things that, I was afraid of her. Luckily for me, Cooks Hospital makes you take a BLS (Basic Life Saving) course before you can even strap that baby in a car seat to come home. I wish every hospital in America would do that. I think it’s a great thing.
Melissa:
From the time she was three months to 12 months, I resuscitated her three times by myself until medics got to my house. So that was my first dealing with paramedics when she was born, and the flight crew came and got her. And then, whenever they would come to my home and take her, you know, to recess here.
Melissa:
But, anyway, I rocked along. She rocked along, and I was working at the VA, and they had an EMT class open, and I said you know what? I want to take that class. And I was like a sponge. I soaked up everything, Anyway, I fell in love with paramedicine.
Melissa:
That was my start in it. It wasn’t anything that I planned, dreamed of, or aspired to be, but I couldn’t imagine being anything else now. So, I love instructing it. I have a passion for EMS, and I hope that is conveyed to my students whenever I teach. But you know, it hasn’t always been easy.
Melissa:
There are a lot of things in EMS you’re going to see. You’re never going to unsee those things. You’re going to hear things; you’re never going to unhear it. And also, things you’ll smell that you’ll never, not smell again. We all know about that, right?
Juddson:
This is true. So, on that note, have you ever been by the booth that has the smells at any of the conferences?
Melissa:
Yes. And, well, only one time. And, you know, I don’t do puke, right? Remember, I, I, I always tell myself, when my babies were a little, and they puked on the floor, I covered it with the newspaper till my husband got home. I can’t deal with. I would just say, and I don’t do puke.
Melissa:
I can do poop, I can do puke, but I don’t want all that much anyway. But, yes, I have. I have smelled the smells, but I’ve also smelled them out in the field. Things that you can smell again, and you’ll be like, oh, I remember that time.
Melissa:
That will bring that whole call back to you. Kind of like, sounds will or, you know, being on a particular scene will bring back memories of scenes you’ve been on. And so, that’s where mental health comes into play. And I think September being, you know, mental health awareness month or suicide awareness month, I guess you could say, we should probably be talking about this more often than just once, you know, a year it’s enough.
Melissa:
It’s enough. Well, I know it’s not a lively topic. I know it’s not a fun topic. Right. But I think it’s an important topic. I know that, in my career, I’ve had friends that I’ve lost to suicide. And it hasn’t been that long ago. I lost another one. I was down in New Braunfels teaching a class whenever they were during his service.
Melissa:
It was hard; it’s hard every single time that it happens. And unfortunately, it’s happening a lot. And, you know, I don’t believe there’s prevention of suicide. I think you would have to be there at that most dire moment to prevent suicide. We could talk about it all day.
Melissa:
And somebody still, if they want to commit suicide, they’re going to commit suicide. It’s one of those things that we can’t prevent. We can let our brothers and sisters in the first-responder world know that we love and care about them. And it is okay to talk about it’s okay to hurt, you know, it’s okay to have, feelings.
Melissa:
When you get off a call, that isn’t normal. You know what I mean? I guess the feelings are probably expected. Oh, but we shouldn’t be going to bed at night thinking about these calls. We should be enjoying time with our family when we’re not on duty. If we’re not enjoying time with our family and doing things that we used to enjoy, there is a red flag, and we need to do something about it.
Juddson:
Well, I have personal experience with it, just like you, with mental health and with suicide and all of that. It is a difficult thing to comprehend for someone who’s never had those thoughts or experiences, so when I think about it, I think about all those calls. I think that I can never truly convey to someone the impact that those things have on me.
Juddson:
You begin to feel like, okay, well, then I might as well keep it to myself. And then that compounds, and you just keep doing it repeatedly until eventually all your head is filled with darkness, and you just can’t escape it. It is what it feels like. Now, the reality is that you can escape it.
Juddson:
You can talk about it; you can survive it. But like you said, if somebody is on the topic of suicide, if somebody has made that decision, that’s just what they’re going to do.
Melissa:
It is, and it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not anyone’s fault for not picking up on, them being sad, or whatever.
Melissa:
People can laugh with you for one minute. Go home and get that. Can you know that overwhelming, consuming darkness you know will hit them, and they’re going to commit suicide? It’s not preventable, I don’t think, because one minute they’re okay, and the next they’re not right. And I’ve, I’ve, I like you. I’ve been in that deep, dark hole, and it’s hard to climb out of and it’s, you know, I think once you have been in that dark place, I think you understand more, you know, and you can see when somebody’s not acting right doesn’t mean they’re suicidal.
Melissa:
But you might say, hey, everything’s going okay, and you might frighten that person. If you would initiate that conversation is hard in the first responder world. I’m not even going to lie. It is. It’s tough to talk about. I don’t know why. Everybody’s under the assumption that we have these superhero capes, and that entitles us to no feelings anymore.
Melissa:
Because there’ve been many times, I’ll go on a call. I can do my job just fine. But when I get home, I break, right? And I cry because I have seen something that that touched my heart strings. It was sad. But there’s, you know, it’s part of being human.
Juddson:
Well, and you mentioned not having feelings. I have, and just like many, I have created this self-defense mechanism where I try not to have feelings. And what that’s done is, at times, I’ve heard my kids describe me as, oh, it’s okay my dad doesn’t have feelings.
Juddson:
This is hard to hear because you know it’s probably not true. But I’ve done it to protect myself from dealing with things. What’s caused so much damage is convincing myself that I don’t need feelings. I don’t have to have them. They’re weaknesses, and they keep me from being strong and doing things that I need to do.
Juddson:
Now I’m on the education side, and I don’t have to feel that way anymore, but it’s hard to escape it once you’ve done it for several years. When we start to bring up these hard topics, most of us begin to joke about them—it’s like a humorous coping mechanism.
Juddson:
I’ve done a whole podcast episode about that, but I’m currently doing my doctorate, and I keep having to read all of this research. It’s endless. And so, I’m learning lots of different things. I learned a new term that they use in the UK called gallows humor. I mentioned that to you before we started.
Juddson:
Gallows humor is dark humor. Yeah. That’s what it means. It’s making light of something that should be serious. We do this all the time in the first responder community. You see it with the military and veterans. They do the same thing. They’ll take something like, oh, I saw somebody die. They don’t have a head.
Juddson:
It was hilarious. Yeah, yeah. It’s an awkward thing we do. But the problem is, I’ve started to translate that into everyday situations. And so, I do a lot of volunteering to coach youth sports and stuff like that.
Juddson:
And these kids will tell me things, and sometimes I’ll make some dark joke about it, and I’m like, oh man. Like, you can’t do that. They don’t get that. That’s not funny to them. But I, I had to preface all of that. I had this conversation with the parents of one of the teams I coach. I was just like, look, parents, your kid is going to come home one day and tell you that Coach Judd was making jokes about dead people, and I want you to know, like, that’s not necessarily something I’m doing, like in a gross way.
Juddson:
It’s more like that’s how I deal with things. Out of what? Just habit. I promise I’m not saying anything crazy to your children. These are just little comments that are funny to me but probably not to anybody else. So, on that note, let’s start with this: do you think humor is a healthy way to deal with hard things, problems with emotions, and problems when we’re out on the scene?
Melissa:
And things are hard, scenes are complicated, and you can tell there’s a lot of, you know, a lot of build-up of, of feelings. I think humor is a good thing, I honestly do. It keeps us going, in a way, that dark humor. Like I said, I can get through it whenever I’m on scene.
Melissa:
I’m even talking dark humor with the rest. Don’t get me wrong; I’m getting through it the best way I know. It’s after the call, whenever a report is written, and I go home to my family, and then I start thinking about that call. What could I have done better?
Juddson:
You know, why did I lose that patient? You know what I mean? Many things are going through my mind about how I could have done that call better. And we, as first responders, put a lot of guilt on ourselves. Guilt is the thing that drives us.
Juddson:
I need to find out where the feeling of guilt even comes from. Because even if I think about it now, I can’t think of a time when somebody died because I wasn’t good at my job. Right? You know, if they died, it’s because what happened to them was impossible for me to be able to fix that in that situation.
Melissa:
I think with me, just in my journey, I have had a lot of guilt, but, you know, I’ve lost a loved one out in the. Yeah, yeah. And where I was first on the scene and in full paramedic mode, I was checking for signs of life. I didn’t even know it was her.
Melissa:
I wasn’t looking at the patient. I was looking for signs of life, which is a type of coping mechanism. I didn’t even realize it was her until my partner brought it to my attention. Hey, isn’t that your cousin’s car? Then I went back to my patient, and that’s when I saw her.
Melissa:
I think that’s where my guilt comes from. You know, whenever; it wasn’t that I couldn’t save her. There was no saving her. She had injuries inconsistent with life, but I think just not knowing her, you know, that it was her whenever I first felt her. I felt a lot of guilt from that for a lot of years.
Juddson:
Really?
Melissa:
Yeah. And I shouldn’t have because I think I’m like that with or was like that with every patient who called and changed my entire career. I can’t say that I’m like that anymore. I see patients for who they are now. That was a coping mechanism that was taken away from me during that call.
Melissa:
It’s something we do. It’s like a switch we turn on. We’re like the normal human response. You turn it off so that you can manage these people, and that’s something we have to do. I don’t I don’t think that there’s something wrong with that. I get like, in the moment, you feel guilty about everything. Still, if we don’t do that when there are things we could do to save somebody, we might not think of them because we’re emotional about the situation; we’re emotionally attached to it.
Juddson:
I agree, so I mean that the hard part is, and I think you’ll hear this from anybody with PTSD. How do you turn that off? You don’t. Once you’ve taught yourself to do that, it is the easiest way to defend yourself or your mind.
Juddson:
It’s also the unhealthiest way to do it. But it’s a catch-22. Like, we must do it to take care of that person. I can’t sit there, be emotional and sad, and still think clearly. Exactly. And so, my mind shuts that off, and you become like a sociopath almost to try to fix the problem.
Juddson:
This is funny, but not funny every year. Not every year, but every so often I’ll take like a, like an online test to determine if I’m a sociopath. Every year, I cross my fingers, thinking, oh God, has it finally happened? It turns out, no, no, I’m still okay. But it’s sad because when you start to realize you’re doing that in out of the context of an emergency situation, it’s like, why like in in this is a very personal example. Still, I’ll give it anyway because I will be pretty open throughout this whole thing.
Juddson:
My wife will try to explain to me how she feels about something, and because it upsets me that she might feel bad about something, I shut my ability to respond to that normally completely off. I’ll just be there, and I’m listening. But I’m not giving any kind of real response to that, so that thing, and it’s not like anybody wants me to solve the problem.
Juddson:
I finally learned that women do not want you to solve the problem. They want you to hear the problem and care about it. And I know that when it’s happening. But my mind decides, for whatever reason, okay, I can’t hear that, and I can’t deal with it. So I’m just not going to. And I will stare at her as if I’m staring through the wall.
Juddson:
And it’s just like, why would you do that? And realistically, it puts a strain on our ability to communicate, and it’s something that I’ve got to continue to work on. But it’s that kind of damage that gets done to people in our world that leads them to the point where they’re like, well, I don’t care about anything.
Melissa:
I’m not any good to anybody. So maybe the best thing for everybody is if I’m just not here anymore. And I think that’s, I’ve had that thought more than once. I’ve had it for months when I felt like that was the solution. I’ve. I’ve had that thought many, many times. You know, a lot of people say, oh, suicide.
Melissa:
It’s so selfish. It’s just so inconsiderate. It’s not selfish. Yeah. When you’re thinking about it, that’s not how you’re thinking about it. I’m not thinking, oh, I want my pain to end. That’s different from what I’m thinking. I’m thinking, oh, I became an absent wife. I never tell my husband I love him. I hardly ever hug him. I’m an absent mom most of the time.
Melissa:
And after Tracy’s death, I took on two more counties. I worked all the time. Our son’s adoption had just finalized, and he was only like 13 months old, and I stayed gone most of the time working in different counties as a medic, you know? And I was that absent wife, and I was that absent mom. And I was living on self-pity, pretty much.
Melissa:
And if I stayed, if I slowed down, my mind would take over, and I would become sad. And so I have to keep busy, even to this day. I have periods in my life when I have to stay busy. I must keep my mind busy. I’m probably not as busy as I keep it right now, but you know.
Melissa:
Yeah, it’s rough with the children, college, and school. You know what I mean? Everything. But I, But I had to keep my mind busy, or I would. I would, fall apart, I would break, and I don’t I’m not one that likes to cry in front of people. I’m not particularly eager to share my feelings.
Melissa:
You would think that I would get used to that sort of thing, because I’m always telling people, you must talk about what’s wrong and every if, every class that I’ve taught. Now, they get a mental health, you know, lecture from me. I give them my testimony about how I almost took my life at work, no less.
Melissa:
And had it not been for my husband sending me a text and him. I know that was a tough call. I know you’re writing a report. I’ve got Bobby fed, bathed, and in bed. How long are you going to be? I got dinner on the table, and I love you. And I’m like, this poor, stupid man.
Melissa:
He still loves me. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. It’s even for you. It is so good to me. He has always. And he has loved me through so much. People don’t realize how hard it is on the spouse. Whenever we get in those deep, dark pits, I’m lucky to have a first responder as a husband to whom I can talk.
Melissa:
You know, about these different calls and things without hurting him, you know, because we can hurt our loved ones just by describing a scene. Your mind will make it 100 times worse than you know what I mean. Then, if you were on the scene. So, I try not to talk about scenes with people who are not first responders.
Melissa:
And I’m always telling my students, you know, we have access to help you. You know what I mean? We have people who have been vetted. They’ve been first responders. And we can get you a counselor. We can get you in touch with a counselor. I tried counseling with a counselor that was not a first responder.
Melissa:
And I think I gave that poor woman PTSD just talking to her about what I did for a living. I mean, oh, I’m sure there are some people that aren’t prepared to hear the things they think they are. So she was like, well, how often do you see death? And I’m like, well, depending on the, you know, weekly, but at least once a week, you know, I mean, I wish I could say I could go a week without seeing somebody die, but some, you know, sometimes that’s not the case.
Melissa:
Yeah. And I don’t think they get that. And the one thing that she did say whenever, I was talking to her, she goes, oh, I thought the firemen had everything cleaned up before the paramedics ever got on scene. I was like, man, I’m good. Shit. What are they cleaning up? Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t know, but like I said, she was clearly not a first responder at any point in her life.
Melissa:
But she was beautiful, and she did try to help me. But I could not get that rapport with her. I wouldn’t open up and talk to her because I felt I couldn’t. I couldn’t make her understand my world, you know? And I was no longer a part of her world.
Melissa:
Once you enter that first responder world, there’s no going back. You know what I mean? Nothing’s ever really normal. You see things differently. And even your outlook on life, people, and everything else is different. Because you see, you see, you see things. Do you know what I mean? Like my husband, he’s a police officer.
Melissa:
He sees the worst. Like, that people, me, I see people in pain or in sorrow or whatever. But your outlook becomes different as first responders.
Juddson:
Oh, I agree 100%, and it never leaves you. You would think the longer you spend off the truck, you forget it.
Juddson:
It doesn’t work that way. Yeah. The reality is that people in positions like this are seeing things that other people just aren’t meant to see. And we must. That’s the choice we’ve made. And I want anybody who’s not a first responder listening to this to understand that I’m not invalid hating what you’ve done.
Juddson:
If you’re a military veteran, if you have a different type of job, all jobs have difficult parts, especially military jobs. You guys see very similar and worse things. Yeah. The idea here is that the body and the mind have pretty much the same defense mechanism that causes all these problems. And then the biggest trick that we play on ourselves is that we’re alone and nobody will understand.
Juddson:
And so instead of talking to our spouses or our friends or whatever, and I agree, sometimes there’s things that I don’t say to my wife about what I’ve seen because I don’t want her to take that pain. Even though I think she’s just strong enough to handle whatever I can tell her. I’m sure, but we assume that there’s no way that you can share this.
Melissa:
There’s no way that somebody else will fully understand you’re in this pit all alone, and it just isn’t the case. We’re sitting here telling anybody who’s listening. We’re in the exact same spot as you, and we’re not even unique. I’m hoping that more and more departments take this seriously.
Melissa:
Like when there’s a critical incident, you know, after my cousin died, there was no critical incident stress debriefing or management or even, you know, really anything. There wasn’t anything. I just bottled all of that up. And months after this happened, I just blew up, you know, and reported one day. And my investigator was like, you need help.
Melissa:
And I’m like, yeah, I probably do. And I mean, so. Yeah, exactly. And, luckily, you know, he got me in touch with such a wonderful man who helped me through so, so much. His name’s Nathan Hines. He’s amazing. I mean, he’s in this neck of the woods and willing to help anybody. He’s just. He’s a wonderful man.
Melissa:
But, anyway, I. I took that incident, and I, I, you know, I just wanted to learn everything I could about mental health. And I feel a calling, I think, from God about this, you know, like taking it deeper, getting my education, maybe helping, becoming a first responder counselor. But it wasn’t until my best friend’s brother committed suicide, and the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance reached out to her to make sure that the family was okay because they are survivors of a suicide.
Melissa:
He had a young boy at that time, and it just hurt. It hurt everybody, you know? And, anyway, they reached out to her, and they are so good. They track all the suicide rates of firefighters, EMS professionals, and dispatchers, and, once a year, they take these families, and they get them, you know, get them a nice room somewhere and away from, from life.
Melissa:
They can talk about their loved ones and remember them. They have one night where they ask all the departments, hey, at this specific time, we were hoping you could turn on all the lights on your vehicles, your emergency vehicles, in remembrance of those that lost their lives to suicide.
Juddson:
And I think that’s a cool thing. And, oh, they’re creating a community. Yeah, they are. So that people don’t feel alone.
Melissa:
Exactly. And they don’t. And Jeff Deal is the founder of this organization; he’s amazing. And, he helped me through some tough times personally. Let me call him and talk to him about many things.
Melissa:
After I lost Tracy, and he’s just been an amazing supporter—you know, he’s given me so much support—this is an amazing thing. They have a workshop called Saving Those Who Save Others. They even have the family edition of this so that the family understands when that first responder comes home and they’re just not feeling, you know, like they’re preoccupied.
Melissa:
They usually are. They’re thinking about that day. But he makes it to where you feel normal again. I’m just talking to him. All these trauma responses are normal. We’re just not taught that when we’re in school, you know? Right. And so, I think whenever we’re, you know, at the end of our skills labs and stuff, and I finally open a conversation about mental health, I think that helps me help our students, you know, just understand you got to take care of your mental health just like you do your physical health.
Juddson:
Well, I think the concept you’re talking about is like a peer tutoring system, like, here’s I’m going to explain how I feel. And in that, it will help me, and it will help you. And so, I’m teaching you my knowledge, increasing my wisdom, and giving you more knowledge. And so, it’s the thing that if we genuinely care about the next generation that’s doing this, then we do, yes, we do, and our school does.
Melissa:
And if we, as other first responders, want these people to be able to come in and do the job that that you’ve done for all these years, you have got to introduce them to the idea that they’re not alone in this and that it’s okay to talk about it. And the hard part is, as we fight against these old dog veterans sometimes, I don’t mean military veterans, I mean veterans of the job.
Juddson:
Exactly. Who will tell you that? No, you don’t share your feelings. No. That’s stupid. You’re being weak. If you do that, and that mindset is why there are so many dead first responders. Yep. And so, you mentioned early on that there is no way to prevent suicide, but there are ways to I think there are ways to try to manage the side.
Melissa:
Right. Just letting people know they have somewhere to turn will help that. Yeah. I hate to say the word prevention because that makes people think, you know, those loved ones close to that person that they can convince. I should have done something. I should have been able to prevent this. I don’t want them feeling like they should have been a, had a, had some way to avoid that.
Juddson:
Yeah. No. And you really don’t like you? You can’t. It’s almost like an alcoholic. Like you can’t convince them not to drink alcohol; they have to do that on their own. Yeah. And all you can do is give them reasons to want to be here, and they may or may not see those reasons. They may not comprehend that at the time.
Juddson:
I know that you mentioned your family pulling you away from it, and mine is the same: my wife and my kids. I can’t imagine making them deal with that whole process, and wondering if it was their fault and that kind of thing. And so that has pulled me away from that many times, and I’m sure it will again someday.
Juddson:
I wish we could come into this conversation and be like, here are five steps to prevent suicide. I would give anything. Yeah. And you can’t; there are not five steps. There’s there’s only hope. That’s all there hope. Prayer and compassion. Yeah. I always say, you know, you have to have faith in something.
Melissa:
You have to have faith in something. That’s what keeps me going. You know, daily is my faith in God, and he’s going to be with me. He’s always going to get me through this. You know, even when I’m struggling, you know, and I think I’m all alone. I’m not alone, you know? But knowing that there are people out there who feel exactly the same way that I feel, and it’s okay to call on them during that time of maybe an emotional break.
Juddson:
I think that would probably be okay, I guess if you wanted to call it prevention. The best way we could do that is to make it okay. It’s okay not to be okay. We need to make that known in the first-responder world. I think there are a lot of departments that don’t have things in place for their people.
Melissa:
And it needs to be mandatory. I would think, because there’s so many things that we see out there that we, you just can’t unsee. And it’s hard. It’s hard as a person to, know how to, get all of that and process it in your head. But talking about it and there’s a lot of data out there, I can’t, you know, mumble it off right now, but there’s a lot of data out there that says if you don’t talk about it, your brain releases it, and you don’t have to live with everything trapped inside your brain.
Melissa:
Like, like, for instance, you and I do because we never talked about it. Right. And so, you know, I was telling one of my classes, I’m like, yeah, I took my son to Universal Studios, and I started crying on one of the rides, and he’s like, “hey, mom, is it something I did?” I said, “no, baby, mommy’s just broken.”
Melissa:
You know, I just see something sometimes, and it just catches me off guard, you know? And, and I, we shouldn’t have to explain that to seven-year olds. Do you know what I mean? We should be able to live our life. And had I just opened, Lee talked about the trauma that I had experienced, maybe I wouldn’t live the kind of life that I live now, you know?
Melissa:
So, I try to prevent that in my students. I love EMT, I love teaching the EMT class because I’m catching them on that foundation level where they haven’t got out there in the field. Yeah, and they haven’t been exposed, hopefully, to those horrific things that we sometimes see. And I can tell them and just warn them, you know, take care of yourself now from the get-go.
Melissa:
And you’re going to have a great career and a great life, and you’ll be able to find that balance, you know, mentally. Because if your mental health goes well, your physical health will not be far behind. And then it just goes down from there. I used to be super fit. Yeah. I’ve never been sick.
Juddson:
And then my stupid brain killed my fitness. Yeah, also eating hamburgers killed my fitness.
Melissa:
Now, a Little Debbie killed my fitness. And then I put them all in my mouth.
Juddson:
That little jerk. Yeah.
Melissa:
I love little Debbie’s. All of them, too. I mean, I’ll eat any box of them.
Juddson: Oatmeal pies, they are the best.
Melissa:
Hey, I got some in my drawer at home right now.
Juddson:
I don’t buy them because I know I’ll eat them. But like them, there’s always, like, cake or something up here. And it’s like, so difficult. We’re about to leave this room and go eat a bunch of cake for a baby shower.
Melissa:
I know they’re lucky I didn’t cut it before now.
Juddson:
I don’t even know who’s having a baby. I’m just kidding. Oh, I so anyway. This is a conversation that we could have a million times over and think of different things that we really want to talk about, but I like where we’re at with it right now, and so I don’t want to drag it out and force us to.
Melissa:
Yeah. So we can talk about it all day. But the thing is, the main point we needed to take away, really, from here, is it’s okay to be not to be okay. You know, let’s talk about mental health. Let’s make it a regular thing to discuss if we’re not feeling okay. I agree. And coming from people who have tried to hide it and mask it with humor and whatever else we’ve come up with over the years, it doesn’t help.
Melissa:
You’re putting a very poorly made, off-brand Band-Aid on a problem that needs stitches and much, much more. And you can’t fix the problem that way. So, trust your family or trust your friends. You can talk to people, and they may not always know what to say, but that’s not the important part.
Melissa:
The important part is that you can say what you need to say, and you can put it out there, and you can give people the opportunity to support you. So that’s what I would leave everybody with. There are, I believe, in our, description of this, we’re going to put some information about suicide hotline and stuff like that.
Melissa:
Yeah, so people have a resource to reach out to in an emergency. Don’t be afraid. I know it can be embarrassing to have to call for help, but you need to be willing to do that because somebody else is going to suffer from the decisions that we make, and it’s not going to fix anybody’s problems.
Juddson:
Yeah. And their testimony may help somebody else out of that deep, dark place one of these days. So, it’ll be the ladder that gets them out, maybe. Well, as always, if you or someone you know is interested in learning more about EMS or furthering your EMS career by becoming a paramedic or an EMT, we encourage you to go to our website, texasemsschool.com.
Juddson:
You get to meet Melissa, probably in a skills lab. You may see me if you come to one of our Abilene skills labs. And we’d love to meet you guys and talk to you. And one day, have you come here and tell us about your experiences.
Juddson:
So, I’m Judd, this is Melissa, and this has been EMTalk.