Inside out

Out there it’s a hot Australian summer, but in here it’s freezing. I’m in the staffroom at work, listening to Dave shout over the coffee grinder about the problem with kids these days. The air-conditioning is set to arctic freeze, but crew keep barging in and out through the door, bringing blasts of tropical humidity that confuse the thermostat and make it colder still. One crew stomp in, hot and dishevelled. They’ve been at a road accident where the bitumen melted onto their boots, and some people died. Another crew are laughing and talking about the hoarder who lost their false teeth down the back of the armchair but called the ambulance because he was certain he had swallowed them. Nobody’s seen the other crew since logon, they got sent straight out to a seizure and were last heard asking for police backup. An out-of-town crew roll in, bitching about being sent so far away to cover.

This is a pretty normal afternoon for a paramedic, action and drama, interspersed with long periods of sitting around waiting. Waiting for the next call out, waiting for a reasonable amount of time to pass before you have another snack, waiting for the Officer in Charge to leave so you can resume slagging off management, waiting for someone else to make coffee so you can get them to make you one too, waiting for the pager to go off, waiting for the end of shift, waiting for the big job.

The big job. Seasoned paramedics often joke about that being something like when the busload of nuns crashes into the trainload of children and it’s right on shift changeover. But when you’re pretty new to the scene, it can be any job. Any job at all can fill you with anticipation and dread. All the training in the world doesn’t mean you feel ready, and waiting for the pager to go off can be almost unendurable.

I realise quite quickly that the waiting would break me… if I let it. Some crew pass the time watching movie after movie; others play on their phones for hours; others talk, telling war stories that are peppered with exaggeration and not entirely accurate. I try reading, but it’s hard to concentrate with swirling tension and anticipation in the room, and you end up reading the same paragraph over and over until the pager goes off.

I need a craft – something to keep my hands occupied, my brain free to wander, that I can put down and leave in an instant and resume hours later, that brings some colour into the beige staff room, that channels some of the crippling anticipation into a useful activity. I also need a headband, being summer, and in that awkward stage between short and long hair. Sometimes, you have your best ideas while doing CPR in the blazing sun. I would make fabric headbands. I could cut and sew them at home and bring them to work to turn inside out.

I keep a special pair of scissors in my uniform, separate to the ones that cut seatbelts in mangled wreckage, leather boots off damaged bikers, and the umbilical cords of newborn babies. These scissors are sharp, and fit perfectly in my hands. There’s a rhythmic comfort in the noise they make as they trim the corners of the fabric ready to be turned inside out.

Years pass, I turn out hundreds of headbands, then thousands. The beautiful fabrics bring colour and brightness to push back the beige walls. Staff know when I’ve been on shift because there’s always a sprinkling of tiny colourful cotton threads left on an armchair. I don’t mind the waiting so much anymore. I have some years of experience under my belt, and although a little dread still lurks inside, you know statistically that the next call out will probably be another malingering sniffle that you’re overqualified to deal with. Now I feel cynicism pushing in. I’m tired, sometimes I wonder if I’m interfering with natural selection, shiftwork is weighing heavily, and occasionally I forget how to laugh. When friends ask what kind of unbelievable things have happened at work lately, often I have nothing to tell them, because even the absurd has become just another job that day.

On my days off, I do market stalls and build up a business. From the outside, you would assume that I must keep doing this craft at work to support the business. In reality, I have to keep building the business, to create the demand, so that I have craft to do at work. I’m very aware it’s a symbiotic relationship that is keeping me sane, but I hope everyone else just sees it as a hobby.

The methodical movement of my hands as I turn each fabric strip inside out is soothing. I can do it without looking now. Conversations swirl around the staff room, sometimes fun and silly, sometimes dark and angry, and I can be part of them, or stare out the window and think about the things I’ve seen that day. You can get a bit deep in your head sometimes, but you can always bring it back to your hands, twisting and turning another piece of beautiful fabric, while Dave still drones on about kids these days, and you wait for the pager to go off again.

From my armchair in the staff room, between call outs, I see the work culture gradually change over the years. Staff mental health becomes a corporate buzz word and motivational posters go up in the hallways. Training programs get delivered by cynical middle management who have their own demons and don’t believe what they are teaching anyway.

I am increasingly grateful I accidentally crafted my own mental health strategy, even before I realized how much I would come to appreciate it.