FIVE WEEKS FROM NOW, IT WON'T MATTER!

November 09, 2006

I wrote “Five Weeks From Now It Won’t Matter” during one of those shifts where the weight of it all had me dead behind the eyes but still somehow moving. It was the kind of day where every call felt like a variation of the same script: someone yelling, someone bleeding, someone demanding something that didn’t exist. And all of it—all of it—was urgent in their world and meaningless in mine.

That idea, that five weeks from now it won’t matter, started out as something I told myself in sarcasm. A coping mechanism, a throwaway line to put distance between me and the moment. But that night, it took on a life of its own. I started applying it to everything.

Patient screaming? Five weeks from now it won’t matter.

Chart that got rejected? Five days from now it won’t matter.

Supervisor breathing down my neck about run times or scene safety or some other desk job fantasy? Five minutes.

I wasn’t trying to be profound when I wrote it. I was trying to survive. I didn’t have a therapist, a support system (other than my wife), or even the vocabulary back then to say I was depressed. What I had was repetition. The rhythmic chant of a medic trying not to come apart at the seams.

I remember writing it fast—like the words were already there and I just had to catch them before they disappeared. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even tired in the normal sense. I was hollow. And in that hollow space, the only thing that made sense was the realization that most of what we endure in this job is temporary. Scarring, sure. Unfair? Absolutely. But temporary.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the mantra cut both ways. It was true for the trauma, yes—but also for the good moments. The quiet dignity, the saved lives, the gallows humor. All of it fades. And I think part of me was grieving that, too.

That post was me whispering to myself: Hang on. You’re not crazy. This isn’t forever. It just feels like it.