You don’t know what you don’t know
Things will start to heat up as this story moves on – when I last left you, I moved south with my 2 dogs, 2year old, and husband. Pssst – spoiler alert – we still live there now and everything works out in the end! But boy, I was not expecting what came next. I’d worked as a death investigator for a few years at that point. I passed my ABMDI certification test and was hired by DMORT. I handled the big stuff (hurricanes, plane crashes, skeletal recoveries) and the routine (decomps, ODs, co-sleeping, suicides, homicides, car accidents). I experienced the on-call world and the full time rotations. I thought I was paid well enough for doing something I loved. Most of my colleagues were respectful and I learned a lot from the pathologists. But then came the other side. Short staffing. Terrible pay. Using my personal resources or getting creative with resources because the only other option was going without (which was also a thing that I did). Disrespectful and untrained staff. Long, unsustainable shifts. And the worst offense of all: a work phone on my kitchen table and a work truck in my driveway. My surroundings had changed – I also had another child and we bought our house – and at first, it seemed as though I was still maintaining that wall between work and life. I didn’t know was that the wall was just an illusion, making everything worse.
The things I don’t know about could fill a cruise ship. I can’t understand how Wi-Fi and routers and boosters and the whole dang internet physically works. Scheduling meetings with people in different time zones melt me into a screaming toddler. I work with forensic DNA every day; it is way more complicated than on TV and yes, I think it is boring. It was the same when I was drinking - I didn’t know that every time I drank more than the “recommended amount,” I increased my cancer risk by 15%. I didn’t know that my sleep was disrupted for 3-10 days – which when you’re working on call, every minute of sleep needs to count. I didn’t realize that the buzzy euphoria feeling lasted a measly 20min in exchange for a 2-3hr drop in Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) that caused anxiety, sadness, thirst for more booze, blackouts, drunk texts, and so on. I didn’t know.
I am obsessed with learning - always have been - and now I’m on a quest to learn everything I can about how a career as a responder effects my life. I enrolled in a graduate program for Disaster Mental Health and got my Life Coaching certification. I want to know why people in my job have a tendency to binge things – work shifts, TV, sex, alcohol, drugs, shopping, lifting weights, running. I want to examine our sleep habits, eating habits, activity habits. Why are suicide rates so dang high among the first responder community? Why are there no studies about mental health in last responders? If we chose these careers, why do we need to find things to numb out when we’re “off?” And are we even ever really off??
I didn’t know there were people out there - coaches and mentors - who were one step ahead of me in this process who could help me through mine. But there are. I’m one of those mentors! And I aim to build a community of responders who don’t have to wait until their colleagues are addicts or suicidal to jump in and help. I aim to “smash the stigma” long before the issue is dire. I want to live the best dang life as a last responder, forensic anthropologist, mother, wife, doggo momma, gardener, Delmarvan, snowboarder, writer, Tex-pat. Join me, won’t you?
Kat
