An open letter to Alison Harmon, Jamie Givens, and Cindy Tarashuk
You don’t know me, but I know you- many people in EMS know you now. We’ve read the articles and watched the footage. We’ve surfed the hundreds of social media responses and a few of us have even added our own to the myriad voices, most of them calling for your heads. You’re experiencing the proverbial fifteen minutes, but not in a good way. The nice thing for you both is that within a month or two several shinier and newer stories will surface in the media subsequently eclipsing your failure. You’ll quickly fade back into anonymity. Unfortunately your transgressions will never fade for Paul and Cindy Tarashuk.
I’d like to get on social media and rant about you both. I wish I had the blissful ignorance to just cry for your expeditious march to the gallows. It would be so easy to file you away in some mental folder labeled “Idiots.” Yet I can’t do it. You are such perfect examples; you’re textbook symptoms of a disease that afflicts our profession, and rather than simply trash you, I am compelled to use you as a teaching tool - to utilize your colossal breech of duty to reach providers new and old. I’ll do so by way of a truth a very wise friend once told me: The opposite of love is not hate. Hate requires passion. The opposite of love is indifference.
It was not hate for your job or for Mr. Tarashuk that dictated your behavior on that dark highway in South Carolina. It was not even laziness, for it would have taken far less effort and time to have grudgingly transported the man to an ER and made him someone else’s problem. No, it was pure indifference. You simply could not have cared less for what happened to Paul. You were so taken by your own desires and needs that you were blind to the obvious signs of distress. “Normal” people wear clothes in public. They avoid meandering on foot along major thoroughfares. They answer questions and respond appropriately. Paul did none of those things. He was the very essence of altered mental status. Yet you didn’t care. You wanted to be somewhere else. Maybe, as you indicated on camera, you really just wanted to be asleep. Perhaps you were wishing for a more interesting patient. Whatever it was that you would rather have been doing, it trumped your responsibility to your patient so egregiously that he ultimately died. That a law enforcement officer equally foundered in no way absolves you of culpability. You failed this man, not for lack of training and knowledge, but for an abysmal lack of compassion.
Indifference and lack of compassion are a black fungus in our profession. Clinical ignorance can be addressed with remediation and supportive education. Unfortunately there is no training for being a honey badger. Not giving a shit says more about who you are as a person than what you know and do not know about medicine. A lack of empathy cannot be remedied in a classroom. With that in mind and after seeing you in action, I seriously question whether any service professions are a good fit for you.
Since it seems that the state of SC, and more surprisingly your agency leaders, have thus far decided that you may continue to practice, you will still be representing the industry that I have embraced and loved for the past twenty-five years. I would therefore like to offer this advice: Compassion for other people is the cornerstone of good medicine. It is followed only just behind by clinical competance. While I would hope that all prehospital personnel possess both traits, a provider may be able to function temporarily with only one. It is, however, disastrous to have neither, as you have so poignantly demonstrated. If you continue on this career path, I implore you to seek additional training as well as a mental health checkup. If you won’t do this, I’d rather you just find a new line of work. Your potential patients would agree. Finally, learn from this grievous error, and don’t ever forget Paul Tarashuk.
Cindy:
No words or deeds can ever give you back your son. I cannot imagine the anguish and anger and betrayal you feel right now. EMS failed you and your family. We failed you with such self-righteous navel-gazing that there should be criminal negligence charges pending. It is of little practical value, but I would like to express my most sincere apologies on behalf of EMTs and Paramedics across this nation and around the world. This is NOT who we are. We should have been so much better for your son. May you find peace during this difficult time, and may you someday find it in your heart to trust EMS again.
Thank you. You put into words perfectly what many of us thought, completely aghast that nothing seemed appropriate nor able to convey exactly what we were thinnking.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the read, Heather. We should all be very vocal about these things - they are not good for patients or our profession.
ReplyDeleteI am a retired CCRN. I did not have the stomach paramedics had, I am sure. I received patients after the ER or surgery, yet still unstable. When I first saw the video I wanted to scream at all of them to take him to the ER. instead, they toyed with him like a cat with a mouse......this made me sick. As was stated, one doesn't walk along the highway half naked. There was something wrong. He was not violent so it would have been an easy ride. Ms. Lack of sleep would already have been in bed had they just taken him. They may have kept their jobs but they cannot hide from God. The Holy Bible states God gives 10 fold ( 10 X ) to those who have harmed his children. Their day will come and they will remember. Thank you for speaking your feelings about this.
ReplyDelete