...its all coming back to me...

I don't think that I have PTSD.

But I wonder ...

Like tonight when I was watching an episode of the final series of ER...where Dr Benfield is resuscitating a child whilst Mark Green is simultaneously...in her memory...resuscitating Dr Benfield's own son...

...and I find that I am crying hot tears that turn cold on my face...that my chest feels tight....
...and I am transported back to somewhere else...
...somewhere usually hot...and its usually night and I am resuscitating a dying child...a shot child...a stabbed child...a drowned child...as part of a team or by myself...in the back of a wildly driven ambulance... or in 'Room 1' of Area 161,the Children's Emergency Unit at the Johannesburg Hospital...jumping from Echo One with the rotors still turning and running desparately into the ER of some distant cottage hospital...sometimes in some dusty Godforsaken township with desperate parents keening already in the background, knowing that the umlungu can't save their child

No one ever blamed me...indeed I often received letters of thanks...I was always the last person to stop cardiac compressions,or to switch the monitor off or to stop bagging...

And always ...always...there is the "Lost Boy"...a street child...a boy of about 7 , who in the winter of 1986 was standing next to an open fire when some bastard threw petrol on it and he was brought into 161 with over 90% burns...he was dead,he just didn't know it...

I say a prayer for him most nights,which is difficult since we never knew his name and I am -at best- a retired catholic...but what else am I going to do ?

And so I start to shake and need to stand up and stick my head out of the window...and... like tonight...I have to break into my emergency stash of mini-Bar-ones that my kids always seem to give me for Christmas.

So I don't think that I have PTSD...maybe I am just hypoglycaemic.

Thanks for the Bar One.