True believers, I am sitting here a completely different person than I was a year ago. I mean that it’s strange a year ago I was in a downward spiral, I felt persecuted, I felt unappreciated, and I felt that I was just going to be present, that’s it just be present until I was no longer here. I started doing increasingly more and more dangerous things because they felt somehow like they were important. I felt betrayed by everyone who cared about me and just couldn’t understand why the one person I loved the most didn’t need me anymore and the things that I was trying to do for people were no longer wanted. So what happens when a former action guy feels utterly worthless? He decides that he must do something about it, he warps the things he holds sacred just enough that he thinks this is as it has always been. The problem is, he isn’t the person he sees in the mirror, that person is sad and full of darkness. I have taken care of people who get like that, these are people who once upon a time were full of light but they fell hard, and they tried to fill the void with chemicals. I was fortunate that I was too poor for chemicals and had to settle for doubling my Tylenol PM dose each night to get me to sleep, and I have never really liked alcohol so I wasn’t even interested in mooching off my friends or other means.
What’s worse is that I barely remember what I was doing, it meant that little to me because I meant that little to myself, why should I care about myself when no one else does? But I was trained to mask my own pain and suffering, to show the world that I am handling their crisis just fine and that the fact a woman took her last breaths on the phone with me while I tried to get the fire department inside, according to my co-workers and boss I was just fine, nothing wrong with The Zombie Medic. add in a couple of dead babies and their screaming mothers, I was just fine. I wasn’t sobbing in my truck on the drive home at all.

I was seriously fucked up, and no one knew just how fucked up I was, because if they had they should have been running for their lives.

And then, I got help.
I found a psychologist who understood public safety workers
Men and women from my past answered my call for help in the way that only people who have risked it all to save a stranger can for one of their own, everyday someone would check in with me, every day I would wait until Mrs. ZM and Little ZM had left for the day, stand in my bathroom and say the words that my friend James would say to me so many years ago, “you ain’t the fastest, you ain’t the strongest, and you sure as hell ain’t the prettiest, but you got up when you hit the floor and not everyone does that, so get out there and show the world just how great you is” I have often thought that needs to be embroidered on a throw pillow. My recovery has actually been much faster than I thought it would be, I have taken the time I needed to show myself how great I is, with that has come the blessed amnesia that comes when someone has gone through a traumatic experience.
I took some time, identified what my triggers were, and simply don’t associate with them, I hide posts from certain people, pages, and groups on Facebook, I am shifting my thinking to Bushido and living my life in a single flash of lightning, to be in the moment, to let go of the past and await the future. The best part about this is that it has confused so many people, why is the Zombie Medic so cheerful.. because he has been into the deep darkness of despair, and just when he thought all was lost, something lit a match, which lit a torch, and as we know the darker the darkness the brighter the light, well my light just happens to be a 1000 candlepower tactical light sometimes in my hand, frequently at the end of my Sig, and my little light is shining into all the dark places, for evil can not stand the light.