Power

My phone pings.
A text from one of my teen naloxone battalion.
”Saved a life” it reads.

Armed to the gills with advice from my therapist on handling a traumatized teen I throw myself on the call button.

I enthuse my pride and, at my therapist’s advice, ask for their account…

“Yeah he was blue, cold, not breathing, unresponsive.
I did what you said.
He came back to life.
I forced him to wait for the ambulance in the recovery position.
I went to lunch”

That’s it??!!

All my woo woo words, so responsibly researched and rehearsed to soothe and settle a traumatized teen who had chased death from a corpse, were redundant.
The ghastly notion that a teen should be in a world where this was a thing, was all on me.

For them it was a casual
’I came, I saw, I narcanned’

And so, afraid that I had missed something and afeared of leaving this amazing teen in trauma, I proceed to poll my therapists both past and present. Did I miss something?

Their response was unanimous…
”Sheila, trauma is what happens when we are powerless. You gave them the power.”

Even as I write now, I feel the gravitas of that concept.
I high five Luke.