A Paramedic's Tales by Graeme Taylor

Author:Graeme Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Emergency medical technicians, British Columbia, Biography, Emergency medicine, Ambulance service, Autobiographies
ISBN: 9781550179033
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2020-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Breakup

At the time, I didn’t see the collapse of my marriage coming, but in retrospect I can see that it was almost inevitable.

I liked living in a small town. I had not only succeeded in building a better Ambulance Service there, but I had organized a community development group. We had ambitious plans to line the main street with traditional wooden façades and boardwalks and make our district a western-themed, four-seasons holiday destination. Some of the best artists in Western Canada lived in the area, and two of them had agreed to paint murals on the sides of downtown stores to complement the design.

Our proposal called for paths leading to the centre of town that could be used for horse riding in the summer and cross-country skiing and snowmobiling in the winter. Although most of the local businesspeople were enthusiastic, the restaurant owners were outraged about our plan to put hitching posts outside their front doors: “And who’s going to clean up all the horse poo? Not us!” I told them that if they let us spruce up the town, every tour bus would stop by, their business would double, and one of the extra employees they hired could clean up any droppings, but they wouldn’t budge. “You call this a business plan? All you’re going to attract is horseshit and flies. No way!”

Despite the occasional problem, I was happy, but my wife wasn’t. Karin had grown up in a big European city, and although she made friends in our adopted town, her family and closest friends were far away. Also, I admittedly wasn’t very romantic. We had married during my paramedic training, and while I had skipped an autopsy to attend the ceremony, I had turned down an offer of three paid days off because I didn’t think I could afford to miss more classes. So we never had a honeymoon. And after we moved to the Interior, I was always on call so we could rarely get away, and when we did, we were never alone because we were looking after small children. I wasn’t worried because I thought it was normal for young parents to be always busy and tired, and I figured we should and could just tough it out.

But Karin and I gradually drifted apart. I should have signed us up for couples counselling, taken time off work, gone away with her on an extended holiday. Instead, sure that everything would improve with time, I soldiered on, until one day Karin told me that she was taking the kids and moving to Victoria.

What a depressing mess. I’d lost my family and, with them gone, my reason for living in the Interior. To cut expenses, I sold our house and moved into a little hut in the bush, hoping that soon I would be able to transfer to a unit chief position in the Victoria area. But summer turned to fall and fall to winter without any unit chief vacancies being posted.

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