SHATTERED.

April 5, 2007

I wrote Shattered after one of the hardest calls I ever ran.

I was the responding ambulance for the van crushed by semi. I saw it all—the flames, the wreckage, the helplessness. I watched a man trapped, pinned beneath metal and glass, screaming for help we couldn’t give fast enough. And I remember the truck driver on his knees, sobbing on the side of the road, covered in blood and diesel and disbelief. We all stood in it—sirens blaring, people yelling, and yet there was this awful silence underneath it all.

Writing that post wasn’t a choice. It was a purge.

I couldn’t stop replaying the moment in my head—how ordinary the day had been, how fast it flipped. One minute that guy was driving home, probably thinking about dinner, maybe talking to his wife on the phone. The next, he was gone. Just like that.

I wrote it because I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything—everything—was breakable. That we live our lives thinking we’re safe in these routines, but we’re always just one bad lane change away from tragedy.

That post was me trying to pick up the pieces that couldn’t be picked up at the scene. I needed to give it shape. Not for closure. There’s no such thing in this line of work. But to make sure that man, that night, that moment—didn’t vanish into the call log like just another run.

Because I remember it.

And I still carry it.