About this essay:
Jeremy Norton is the captain of a Minneapolis firehouse and a certified emergency medical technician. He is the real-life version of the thing so many little kids think they want to be. But “hero” isn’t a word Jeremy would use to describe himself … and it’s a title that often feels like a burden instead of praise.
In “The Trauma Sponge,” Jeremy shares his experience working in a role where traumatization is just a part of the gig. Where nearly every day on the job is the worst day of someone else’s life.
The title of that episode is a play on Jeremy’s soon-to-be-published memoir, Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response. The book is out in the world TODAY wherever you buy books! (And you should — Nora highly recommends it.)
Killing My Dog
Years ago I took a community creative-writing class. It was swell and largely innocuous. A gaggle of adults discussing stories they’d written about themselves while insisting it was fiction, but also exactly how things happened. The first meeting, the instructor apologized for being distracted; she was struggling with a serious personal crisis.
Her dog was sick.
A pall fell over the room. We were empathetic and respectful of her possible loss. We were writers, after all. The specter of sick-dog trumped everything and we all mourned, uncritically.
In subsequent weekly meetings, class discussion circled back to her dog. Always. Before class, during the break, afterwards: One or two people would hover and bend her ear with their sympathies–which flowed seamlessly, and quickly, into their own personal sick-dog stories.
Everyone, it seemed, had lost a faithful companion. Here was a universal theme.
The class became less about writing than about communal canine grief. Every discussion morphed into dog crisis support circle, or sentimentally righteous testifying to the unassailable Truth about Our Canine Companions. Literary merit was irrelevant.
Now, I love dogs. I prefer them to most people. But I had some issues with the class: Hey, what about writing? The word dog isn’t a substitute for critical engagement. Spending seven grand to replace an eight-year-old beagle’s hips is NOT a given, not in my world. I felt like Scrooge. It’s discomfiting to be the jerk in a perpetual bereavement circle.
My objections had plural roots, the first of which was my childhood dog. She was great: a sweet, goofy, wholly untrained Golden retriever, the sole pet to make it more than a year with us. Our first three or four dogs met untimely ends before Holly, who arrived when I was in seventh grade. She lived nearly fourteen years. She should have gone at twelve, when she fell down the stairs and broke her leg. Yet instead of ending it then, mercifully, in the vet emergency clinic, we heeded the advice of the vet, and spent hundreds of dollars to “save” her. She dragged herself around for another thirteen months. My family loved her too much to end her misery. Nothing complicated: We couldn’t bear to be the instrument of her death, so she struggled on, suffering. It takes a deliberate mental jump to collectively ignore the sick dog in the living room. And by the end, when we could accept it was time, the painful truth was that it was far past time. More embarrassing.
I swore I’d never be so lovingly blind again–not for a dog, not for a person.
Another issue I had with the uncritical support group was that, as a Minneapolis firefighter and EMT, I have for years seen, heard, touched, and smelled the undeniable truth of life’s end. Death. Not only death: dying.
From pre-birth incidents (often miscarriages) through births in bathrooms or ambulances, to senescence and dying, to death -- and everything in between -- we get called for medical emergencies. We enter people’s homes on their worst days or final minutes. We sometimes can resolve an issue, or save someone: swiftly stop the bleeding, start the breathing, and zip them to the ER, where the doctors might be able to prevent death from winning the day. More than all that, though, I spend my time among people struggling to get by. The 911 system and the ER is the first and final medical interaction for many of our citizens. Acute illnesses, long-term diseases, untreated mental and physical maladies are all baseline for many of our patients. And then, the sudden emergencies, whether cardiac arrests or car wreck or falls from a ladder or penetrating traumas from guns, knives, industrial equipment. I seldom see happy scenes at work.
My job – the human suffering and loss I encounter and must deal with – clarifies my perspective on living and dying. Thrust suddenly into the ghastly or tragic or absurd points on the spectrum of human experience, we do what we can, absorbing the victims’ or the survivors’ grief, fear, and pain. Then we leave and wait for the next call.
It’s a great job, an honor, but it changes how one views the world.
My first day at a fire station, I was a wreck. More nervous about fitting in than the emergencies to come, I sat at the table listening to the coarse manly banter. I leaped into a conversation about dogs. A safe topic: men and their dogs. Though my dog wasn’t trained to chase birds, Watt was a husky, macho and impervious to the elements. I spent his formative years in Chattanooga surrounded by champion field dogs. We’d been outsiders in the South, and we could be so up North. We commiserated with a guy whose prize Pointer pup had gotten plowed by a three-quarter-ton pickup on a rural backroad. The guy and another firefighter had been scouting for the upcoming bird season. Three dogs in the back of the truck, two guys chewing Skoal and telling tired jokes. The pup had bolted. Smushed right in front of dogs and men.
“Sad,” we said. “That really sucks.”
The guy shrugged. “Would’ve been a good bird dog, dumb son of a bitch.” He shook his head. “Then Lucky got cancer. Had to put her down, too. Just got back last night."
More commiseration. “Two in a month. Fucking sucks.”
“Yeah. Kids won’t stop crying. The wife’s upset, too, like it’s my fault or something.”
I asked about the older dog, how old she’d been. Lucky was only six. Watt’s ten, I said. I dreaded the day he got ill. The guy shrugged again, said his dog took it okay.
“The ride to the vet?” I asked. “Watt hates the damn vet. Gotta drag him into the truck to get him there.”
He stared at me a moment. “No, the whole thing. We were up to the cabin, I took her for a walk along the lake. I knew which clearing I wanted, back from the shore and any kids playing.” He chuckled to himself. “She took it easy on me.”
My turn to stare. “How so?"
"Didn’t look back. She sat, I stroked her head a couple times, then that was it. I had the pistol under my shirt. Luck didn’t turn around. If she had, one look and I’d have shot myself.” He stared through me, his face tight. “One shot, down she went.
Everyone murmured firefighter’s version of condolences: “She was a good dog.”
“Yeah.”
"That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, too bad.”
“Yeah.”
“Always hard.” A pause. “So, who’s cooking dinner?"
"That’s you, Rookie. Better be good.”
Dinner. My next biggest fear: Cooking for this devoutly meat-and-potatoes crew. A grown man with two college degrees and ten years working as a professional, I was keenly aware that one fits in, or one doesn’t. It mattered what these folks thought of me. Not that the crew would let me die in a fire, but – the shifts are long. A hostile crew could make life hard. Yet all I could think was, “Oh, I see. They shoot their dogs here. We shoot our dogs.”
It wasn’t the time to debate gun control or my fervent skepticism to the NRA’s 2A con. Growing up in DC, my knowledge of guns was limited to handguns used to kill other people. My time in Chattanooga provided sudden immersion into gun and hunting culture, daily use, legal use, practical use. Same with Minnesota: These guys owned guns. They used guns. They shot, cleaned, and ate animals. I shopped at the organic market. They put their pistol to their dog’s head and “put him down clean.” My family had ignored our dog’s misery while waiting for the Death Fairy to come in the night and leave a puppy on the hearth.
This was a new world for me. I sipped my coffee and tried imagining shooting Watt. And because it’s the fire department, without missing a beat someone built on this story, “Better than what happened to Smith.”
“What?”
“Same deal. Old dog, deaf and half-blind, couldn’t drag itself to piss. The bastard finally admits it’s time, takes him out to the woods. They stop and right as he puts the barrel against the dog’s head, the damn dog turns and looks at him. Smitty starts to bawl. He pulls the trigger, Bang! but he just wounds it. Dog goes screaming through the bushes. Smitty has to chase it down. Fat fuck nearly had a coronary. So he catches the dog, it’s a bloody mess.” The guy paused, snorted, “He was so gassed from the chase, he ended up shooting three more times to kill that poor mutt.”
People chuckled and cursed Smitty’s bad aim and Bud’s worse luck. I nodded again, half-wondering whom in the room was armed. I decided it wasn’t the best time to mention I was a vegetarian.
Thank you to Jeremy for sharing his writing and life with us.
You can listen to his episode here and order Trauma Sponges here.
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