One Holiday Season I’d Rather Forget

One year while I was working at Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania during the holidays, we had two incidents that appeared to be suicides. One incident was on Christmas Eve and the other on New Year’s Eve. I was “fortunate” enough to have been working both evenings.

Christmas Eve in the emergency department, we received a radio alert from an inbound ambulance, a trauma victim from a motor vehicle accident. We only knew that it had been a head on collision between a car and a large truck. We got the rest of the story when the ambulance crew arrived. A middle aged male was going the wrong way on a four-lane divided highway. There was little more we could do than to pronounce him deceased. He had massive trauma to his head, legs, and chest.

Later that evening when we were able to identify the driver, we were crushed to find he was the husband of one of our medical/ surgical nurses. She was a nurse with whom I had worked the nightshift several years earlier. They were going through a divorce and had two young sons; eleven and thirteen. The sadness of that tragedy affected the entire hospital. Actually it affected the whole town. It was as though someone dimmed or extinguished the Christmas spirit. Shortly after his funeral, the nurse quit her job at our hospital, sold her home, and moved away.

The second suicide occurred on New Year’s Eve. Again I was fortunate enough to be on duty. The ambulance crew called with an abbreviated report. A young man had been found unresponsive in his garage with the car’s engine running. He was slumped over the steering wheel. Not knowing how long that he’d been there, the ambulance crew attempted to revive him and brought him to the hospital.

He was a well known person in the community and the ambulance crew did all they could to resuscitate hem. We continued for a short while after his arrival, but to no avail.

It was rumored that he was heavily in debt and he left behind a lovely young wife to deal with the chaos of his death. They had a new house and a new baby, but with all the things she had, she’d lost so much.

The tragedy of these two deaths extinguished my Christmas lights and silenced the New Year’s bells for me. It was as though that year’s holidays were wrapped in a gray blanket. I remember nothing more about that Christmas and New Year other than those two deaths and the grief and sympathy I shared with those two families.