Talking Green

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There’s a secret behind this job.

You go to work. You run the calls: the boring, the exciting, the obnoxious, the weird. Occasionally, the terrible. You see, you do, you move on. Like everything else, it runs off our backs. Like rain off a tin roof.

At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. But there’s a secret.

The secret is that hidden beneath the uniformed cowboy swagger of no-problem, we-got-this, no-big-deal, a thick vein of psychological stress is flowing. You don’t see it in your coworkers, because they hide it away. When it reaches you, you do the same, because it’s not okay to show it. Our professional image is unflappability, and you can’t be unflappable if you let things get to you. So we push it under the rug.

Until one of us takes their own life.

PTSD, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and yes, suicide, are a fact of life in EMS. But we never talked about it. At least, not until a few of our colleagues were brave enough to start shining light upon the problem, in an effort called the Code Green Campaign.

Code Green collects anonymous confessions from our brothers and sisters who can’t speak them out loud, reports the (all too frequent) suicides, collates the research exploring first responder mental health, and performs outreach to build awareness.

Explore their website for more information about their basic mission. After that, come back, because I asked them to unpack a few of the subtleties behind this problem and how they’re trying to solve it.

Question: While most first responders agree with the need for the Code Green Campaign, most of us haven’t actually done anything about it. You did. How and why did it first come about? What was the impetus and how did the early days take shape?

Answer: In March of 2014 one of my co-workers died of suicide. After his death I was talking about it with a group of friends, and we realized that even though we worked for different agencies in different states, we all knew someone that had died of suicide or had a serious attempt. We knew that this couldn’t be a coincidence, so I started looking into it further. I couldn’t find a lot of data, but what I did find told me that this was a much bigger problem than anyone realized.

Once we established that there was, in fact, a mental health problem, as well as a stigma problem, we started discussing what could be done — particularly about the stigma. It occurred to us that if there was one thing first responders like doing, it is sitting around telling stories. We thought that if we could come up with a way for first responders to share the stories of their own mental health problems, other people could read them and realize they weren’t the only ones struggling. We started collecting the stories and posting them on social media every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Things blew up from there.

In the early days things moved fast. My co-worker died on March 12th, and on March 16th we came up with the story sharing idea. We came up with our name a couple days later, and I think it was by March 23rd that we had our Facebook page up and running and stories being shared.

Q: Let’s get down to the elephant in the room. Why is this a problem for us? Why do EMS providers seem to be at higher risk for mental health issues in general, and for suicide in particular, compared to bakers, librarians, and schoolteachers?

A: I’m going to preface this answer with the warning that this is a lot of supposition, extrapolation, and educated guesswork. PTSD has most extensively been studied in the military population, so that is the best info we have. This is also a simplified answer, since the long answer would probably beat a doctoral dissertation in length.

  1. We are frequently exposed to known risk factors for PTSD, such as seeing people hurt or dead, feeling helplessness or fear, having poor social support after a traumatic event, and having extra stress outside of work (marital, financial, etc).
  2. We are poorly prepared for the realities of the job. Yes, we’re warned that we’ll see blood and guts and gore, but we’re not told that we are going to feel helpless on a regular basis, or that we’ll be scared we hurt a patient or made them worse. We’re not taught about how different this job can be from normal jobs, and how hard it can be for spouses and other family members to understand what we go through.
  3. Aside from stressful calls, we’re exposed to higher rates of assault, vehicle crashes, and workplace injuries than many fields, which can add to the trauma.
  4. We seem to have higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse, although it is unclear why.
  5. We work in a very macho field and we’re supposed to be the helpers, not the ones that need help. There have also been reports of people being suspended or fired after admitting they have a problem. That combination helps create a huge stigma against admitting any sort psychological problem and asking for help.
  6. We have more knowledge about lethal means of suicide.

Q: Okay, so let’s contrast EMS against some similar fields. Other first responders like fire and police, or medical personnel like doctors and nurses, all seem share most of the qualities you listed. Are they in the same boat? Or is there anything that puts us at greater risk compared to them?

A: Other first responders like fire and police are in the same boat. In fact, we don’t separate EMS numbers from fire service numbers because the employee base is so entwined.  There are almost no fire departments out there who don’t do any EMS at all, so it is tough for us to draw a line as to who counts as EMS and who doesn’t. Just because an agency doesn’t transport doesn’t mean their employees/volunteers aren’t exposed to the same trauma. If you can’t draw the line at transport versus non-transport, where do you draw it? In the long run, it becomes almost impossible to separate people out. With police officers it is easier, but their suicide rate is on par with Fire/EMS. I believe that in 2014 there were over 140 reported police suicides.

As far as other medical professionals go, we do know that doctors do have a high rate of suicide, to the tune of 46 per every 100,000 (for first responders we’re looking at about 30 per 100,000). We don’t know what the suicide rate is for nurses, PAs, or NPs, but we wouldn’t be surprised to learn it is also high.

This is purely supposition on my part, but I do think we are particularly susceptible, because EMS is less developed than other medical fields. Nurses and doctors have well-established professional organizations representing them at the state and national levels. EMS is much more fragmented. The one big difference we’ve especially noticed with nurses and doctors compared to EMS is that many states have license preservation programs in place for RNs and physicians, but not for first responders. That is, if they have a mental health or addiction issue, their state may have an official program in place to help them keep their license while getting help. Few (if any) states have a similar program for first responders. EMS doesn’t have that kind of well-organized advocacy yet.

Q: I expect many of our readers aren’t familiar with license preservation programs. What are they and what are the possible ramifications when we lack one?

A: My answer is based on the states I’ve lived in. From what I understand, most states have such a program set up for either doctors and/or nurses. Basically, the state has recognized that nurses and doctors spend considerable time and money to obtain their licenses, and that it is in everyone’s best interest to keep them on the job, rather than automatically revoking their license. Here is an example of how it would work: say a nurse starts diverting narcotics. She self-reports her behavior to her employer and to her state licensing agency. She will likely be suspended or fired from work, but if the state has a license preservation program her license will only be suspended. The licensing board will then review the case and outline what the nurse has to do to get her license reinstated. They may require her to complete a treatment program, attend weekly counseling sessions, and submit to monthly drug tests. As long as she meets those requirements, she can keep her license.

The issue with lacking a license preservation program is that it creates an atmosphere of fear. People will avoid seeking help for anything they think could possibly cause their license to be suspended, since they have no way of knowing the outcome of that. No license means no job, and unless you want to move to another state, you’d have to come up with a new career fast.

Q: In the absence of such programs, is there a real possibility that EMS providers can lose their jobs or even their certifications merely for reporting mental health issues? In other words, no diversion or actual violations, just the typical paramedic suffering from depression, anxiety, or PTSD?

A: This question is difficult to answer because it is based on the idea that people are routinely reporting their mental health issues to the employer or the state. Unless someone is seeking to use Worker’s Comp or other employment benefits for a mental health issue, there is no reason to be reporting routine treatment to anyone (unless it is required, like with some communicable diseases). Someone wouldn’t report that they’re being treated for asthma or hypertension to their employer or state licensing board, so why would they report depression or PTSD? Employment benefit issues aside, in absence of diversion or actual violation it really doesn’t make sense for anyone but the person and their treatment team to know anything. 

Such programs are generally more reactive than proactive, although in the ones I’ve looked at it is strongly encouraged to self-report issues/violations before they are caught by an employer. In fact, at my employer you’re much more protected if you self-report to the EAP than you are if you get caught.

I think that no matter what the reality is, having programs like these make it so that people don’t feel like they are backed into a corner once they develop an issue. We don’t want people feeling like a situation is hopeless, we want them to be able to see there are options.

Q: I imagine that in most cases, “reporting” occurs in the circumstances of a worker’s compensation claim (i.e. asking the employer to pay for mental health services), or perhaps when an employee needs to take time off work.

In the real world, I expect some employers are inclined to be less than supportive about these types of requests. Are they sometimes refused? Are employees sometimes asked to “prove” that their condition is work-related? Is there a legal framework mandating employers to provide these services and accommodations?

A: We answered earlier that Worker’s Comp claims or using other employment benefits are the instances an employer is most likely to learn that someone is having issues.  It is difficult to answer a straight “yes” or “no” to any part of this question. No one has sat down and studied how often requests like the above are made, how often they are granted, how often they are refused, and if the response to such a request is affected by the type of employer or the state the employee is located in. We don’t know how often time off requests for mental health conditions are granted or refused, or how often they are granted or refused compared to other time off requests at that same employer. We could come up with anecdotes of both positive and negative outcomes, but there is no data.

What is and what isn’t covered by Worker’s Comp will vary from state to state and employer to employer. We do know that there are states where psychological conditions are not covered for anyone, or are only covered for certain jobs, and the employer has no control over that. It’s not uncommon for Worker’s Comp claims to be investigated no matter what kind of claim it is, so we would not be surprised if people filing a claim related to a psychological issue would be subjected to some questioning. Just ask anyone who has filed Worker’s Comp for a back injury or knee injury. Worker’s Comp tends to be difficult no matter what. 

Furthermore, people who have had to take time off for physical injuries will tell you that on top of their injury being investigated and questioned, they likely also had to jump through hoops in order to return to work. Fitness for duty evaluations, physical agility tests, etc. Because of the differences between state laws and agency policies it is very difficult to know if mental health conditions are being treated differently at a significant rate.

As for accommodations, that is even more complicated. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) employers are mandated to provide reasonable accommodations for employees that have disabilities. Now, how many first responders do you know that are willing go through that process, and then admit to their employer that they have a disability that needs to be accommodated? Additionally, first responder agencies are in a tough spot when it comes to accommodations because this field is so unpredictable. Agencies can’t ensure that you’ll never run another pediatric cardiac arrest, or never have to respond to a certain address again. If someone has an anxiety attack while responding to a call, or on scene of a call, is taking them out of service going to be considered reasonable? Probably not. Accommodations get very complicated very quickly.

Q: Interesting. So despite these challenges, the problem is clearly an urgent one. What steps can field staff take to prevent and manage mental health issues, whether for themselves or for their colleagues?

A: Resiliency, and building resiliency factors, seems to be a key to helping prevent mental health issues from arising, so everyone should review what resiliency factors they have and work on building upon them. People also need to be able to recognize signs of decline in themselves, such as worsening sleep, increased drinking, and anger issues. For co-workers, the biggest thing is not to be afraid to say something to someone if you think there is a problem. Asking someone, “Are you thinking of suicide?” is not going to put the idea into their head — so if you’re concerned, ask.

Something else that is important is reducing the stigma around mental health in general. Don’t make jokes about “BS psych patients” or complain that psych calls are a waste of time. This contributes to the stigma and makes it harder for people to admit they have their own problem.

Q: What other points do you want do make on this important topic?

A: We need to keep talking about this and keep the conversation going. Changing how mental health is addressed is going to involve changing the culture, which is going to take time and effort.

For people who want to get involved there are several things you can do. Speak up if you hear someone speaking negatively about mental health, whether in the context of our peers or our patients. If you hear about a suicide, please report it to either Code Green or to the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance. All reports are confidential and we do not disclose information without permission.

If you know of a first responder–friendly mental health professional in your area, let us know so we can add them to our resource database. It may not seem like much, but this kind of stuff is incredibly helpful to us and to the cause.

Visit the website of the Code Green Campaign to learn more, read personal accounts, and see else what you can do to help.

Either Lead, Learn, or Please Stop Talking

computer-punch

 

The Internet is a wonderful educational resource.

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but it’s good to be reminded. As little as 20 years ago, it simply wasn’t possible to learn things in the same way or to the same extent as today, because you had to seek out the information like Indiana Jones hunting a lost jewel-encrusted kumquat. Now there are a thousand PhD’s worth of knowledge available for anyone with a modem (although it behooves us to remember that much of it is still more easily found offline, and some remains completely undigitized even now).

I have always relied heavily upon this resource, and the majority of the synapses currently rattling around my noggin wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the ’net. I went to school, sure, but when it came to pursuing my interests and hobbies, that’s not where the money was. It even filled the bowl of my early work history — I worked in web design, various sectors of freelance writing, even as a certified locksmith, all of it made possible by self-education via an endless tap of bits and bytes.

When I first became involved in EMS, I expected that to remain true. But it wasn’t.

 

EMS 2.0: Good, bad, and ugly

Although somewhat inchoate in my early days, the EMS 2.0 movement was already getting legs, and was driven by an online community of paramedical luminaries hoping to remodel our damaged field into a modern, functioning system.

More recently, the larger arena of the medical community — with emergency medicine leading the way — has embraced FOAM, the general principle of free online medical knowledge-sharing. This is good stuff, and it’s just what we need.

But when I was a green EMT — and we all know how unprepared a freshly certified newbie can be — I turned to the web in the hopes it would help me learn, improve, and become better at my job. To some extent, it did. But I was also stymied.

Everywhere I turned I found veteran EMTs and paramedics advocating for increased education and training within our field. They seemed to passionately believe in making prehospital providers become better clinicians. Yet whenever I would ask medical questions to try and do exactly that — become better — I wouldn’t get answers. I would get further diatribes about the shortcomings of EMS education. Or suggestions to read a textbook (only rarely was one recommended). Or, if I pressed the point, the advice to go to paramedic or even medical school, because this sort of inquiry was likely to make me a fish out of water in my current profession.

Truth be told, I rarely got any answers where I didn’t dig them up myself. And I found this strange. Why would people purportedly so interested in advancing their profession seem to have so little motivation to actually do it?

Time has passed, and I have more perspective. In retrospect, the folks on the other end of the screen often didn’t know the answers to the questions I was asking, or only knew the answers in an incomplete or experiential way. Time has also brought along some actual progress, and there are more true FOAM resources out there.

Yet in the prehospital world, noisemaking still seems to predominate over knowledgemaking. For every blog post, website, forum thread, or social media group dedicated to transmitting information, there are ten whose primary occupation is posting long, repetitive screeds about the gaps in EMS education and the sorry state of our profession.

Now, everybody has a life outside of the internet (well, most everybody), and some of these people are indeed practicing what they preach. They’re teaching and precepting, writing and organizing, even lobbying to accomplish the changes we all dream of achieving.

Many others, though, seem to have endless time and energy for complaining about how dumb everyone else is, and very little for correcting that dumbness. More disturbingly, in recent times, the tone of these complaints has taken a strange turn toward arrogance. Novices foolish enough to poke out their heads are decried for not being up to the level of the complainer (interestingly, the level of the complainer is usually presumed to be the appropriate one — nothing more and nothing less). I imagine a great deal of this stems from frustration. But it certainly doesn’t contribute to a solution, nor does it speak very highly of the veterans behind the keyboards, who are missing the opportunity both to educate and to model professionalism. (Hint: there is no degree of expertise that ever makes arrogance appropriate.)

Yes, ideally we will move to a place where everybody staffing an ambulance has a strong initial education in anatomy, physiology, pathology, and medicine. Yes, this will probably entail degree-granting programs and a fundamental paradigm shift from our current model of training. But until then, there are thousands of EMTs and paramedics on the road or in the classroom with a grossly limited knowledge-base, and a significant number of them are motivated to do better than that. Are you going to blow them off until the day of rapture, or are you going to try and help?

I didn’t want to write this post, because I didn’t want to be part of the problem. This site aims to be zero percent complaining and 100% educating. But we’re just a drop in the bucket, because there are a lot of smart people out there who could do far more good than a hundred EMS Basics, and I wish they would remember it.

The Long-term Care Ombudsman: Advocates on Call

Although we like to talk around here about exciting topics like shock and airway management, the reality is that for many EMS providers — particularly at the BLS level — a large part of this job isn’t stabilizing emergencies. It’s routine work like dialysis trips and stable transfers from nursing facilities. Some folks find this stuff dull, and it can be dull, but the best way to make it interesting is to approach it just like the exciting stuff and try to be excellent at both aspects of the job.

How can you excel at bringing Mr. Smith to his third doctor’s appointment this week? You can learn to be a really good patient advocate on his behalf, something that almost all residents of long-term care facilities need. We’re well-positioned to fill this role because we have a one-on-one relationship with our patients. Unfortunately, we often lack the know-how and leverage to resolve most of their problems.

Our feature in the August 2014 issue of EMS World talks about how to use the ubiquitous Long-Term Care Ombudsman program to help. It’s easy, it works, and even if you didn’t know about it, there’s one available in your area. Give it a read and think about bringing it to bear the next time the guy on your stretcher has something to say!

Worthy Words

Quotation Marks

I admit that I’m a sucker for a good quote. Truth be told, medicine is exactly the type of enterprise that needs quotes. It’s a basically noble endeavor that’s nevertheless rife with the sort of frustrations, obstacles, and everyday nonsense that tends to make us forget why we’re doing it.

Quotes help us remember. A few concise, perfect words from people smarter than us — they needn’t be real people, either, because sometimes fiction is more true than fact — can paint a picture that reminds us in a flash how to do this job, why we’re doing it, and to whom it matters.

To that end, we’ve set up a page to collect the best medicine-related quotes we can find (you can find it in the menu above as well). Some are about EMS, some aren’t, but if you’re on the job, I bet many of them will ring true. Take a look and check back when you can; we’ll try to keep adding the good stuff as we come across it.

Those who Save Lives: Harry Watts

Harry Watts

Who was Harry Watts?

You probably haven’t heard of him, unless you’re English — like he was — and you lived in the 19th century — like he did.

That’s because he was nobody special. He wasn’t a prince or a pope, he never invented a robot or discovered a mountain. Probably never even kicked a ball on television.

What did he do, then? He was born in Sunderland and lived poor. Poor as hell; no shoes poor, family-all-in-one-room poor. His father was a sailor. He had two sisters, and two brothers, one of whom drowned during a storm while Harry watched.

Starting work when he was young, Harry made his living first as a sailor, then as a rigger in the docks, and finally as a deep-water diver (the guys who wear big brass suits and suck air from a hose to the surface). He married and had two kids.

Oh, right. Also, all on his own, he saved the lives of 36 different people.

 

What, what?

While apprenticing on his first ship, he watched his fellow apprentice take a fall overboard. Harry’s automatic response was to dive in after him, pluck him up, and pull him to safety upon some floating timber. That was number one.

On his second voyage, he was waiting to receive the captain who was paddling back to the ship in a small canoe. He suddenly capsized, however, and was floundering in the waves. Harry grabbed a rope, swam out to the captain, and towed him back to the ship’s ladder. That was number two.

Number three was on the same voyage, when a boy was thrown into the water during a major storm, and the waters were too rough to lower a boat after him. Harry went in, and somehow, they both came out.

He rescued four and five on his next cruise — at the same time. So at the age of 19, he’d saved the lives of five human beings.

“Did you get any reward for these doings, Harry?” he was asked.

“Rewaard! Wey, sartinlees nut; nivver thowt o’ sich a thing. But we helped the two men wi’ dry claes an’ things.”

Indeed.

He got six more all together when an anchor line broke and dropped the anchor directly into a passing boat. There were six men aboard, and Harry went straight overboard while calling for help, landing directly on the wrecked boat in time to save them all.

Then one day at the dock, he saw a crowd gathering to watch a boy drowning in a rough sea. He leapt in, swam out to him, and brought the boy successfully back to shore on the verge of exhaustion.

At age 36, he made a career change from sailor to diver. At this point, he’d saved 17 people (plus one dog), most through risk to himself — sometimes grave. On one occasion he swallowed so much contaminated water from the Thames river (this during the cholera epidemic which had essentially turned it into a flowing sewer) that he was bed-bound for months and nearly died.

Many of those saved were sailors; many others were young children. And if you’ve never plunged twenty feet into rough water, wearing boots and heavy sailor’s clothing, and pulled out a panicked child (clinging like an octopus and trying hard to drown you)… well, you’re missing out. At this point, by the way, he had never received reward or recognition of any kind. As they say,

… There is a hackneyed platitude to the effect that virtue is its own reward, but it is safe to say that the average man does not find such a result sufficient. It might be so in an ideal world inhabited by ideal people, but in this work-a-day world, in addition to the approval of our conscience, we love to have the approval of our fellows and to know that our  acts are appreciated, and especially is this the case when we are actuated by altruistic motives. This is, of course, a form of vanity, but then vanity is almost a universal failing. [source]

But if Harry wanted applause, he certainly wasn’t clamoring for it. Just chugging along and saving lives as they presented themselves.

 

People take notice

Not long after that, he swam out to save two boys from drowning — while wearing one of his lead diving boots. (Yep.)

About a year later, he saved a couple more, and finally, there came the very first mention anyone had made of his efforts, a brief story in the newspaper:

Yesterday afternoon, about half-past three o’clock, a lad named Smith, about 16 years of age, son of an engineer employed on one of the Commissioners’ dredgers, narrowly escaped drowning. He was on board a dredger in the new Graving Dock, which was full of water, when he accidentally fell overboard. Mr. Harry Watts, in the employ of the Commissioners, gallantly jumped into the water and rescued him. The lad was very much exhausted, but restoratives were promptly used, and he was soon brought round. This is the twenty-second time that Watts has so nobly exerted himself in saving persons who have been in imminent danger of being drowned.

For a while, eyes turned away again. Then he hit number 25, and another story ran in the news, mentioning the man with “a perfect penchant for rescuing lives.” After that, people finally began to notice, and most of his saves received at least a little local attention.

He had countless saves while diving, such as the man who became tangled in a chain and was whipped overboard by a sinking weight — Harry dove in after and managed to free him underwater before they both drowned. Between rescues, he had plenty of interesting adventures, diving at the time being a trade full of explosives, accidents, and rockslides (he even had one memorable fight with a giant angler, or “devil fish,” which he ended up dispatching with a boat hook).

If that was his job, however, his hobby was volunteering with the Sunderland Lifeboat service; there was hardly a wreck nearby that Harry didn’t attend, they would say, and he was involved in rescuing over 120 sailors in extremis during storms. (Those don’t count on his score, of course, since they were team efforts. Just icing on the cake.)

He was 27, and up to 23 lives, when he received his first parchment award from the Royal Humane Society. A little while later when he ticked off number 25, they gave him their bronze medal as well, and when the local “Diamond Swimming Club and Humane Society” heard about that, they thought it just wasn’t cutting it, so they awarded him a gold medal of their own. The RHS gave him another parchment at number 26, and he continued to accumulate medals for his diving and rescue work — even one from the local temperance society for his good-natured efforts against the evil drink.

In fact, when he reached number 32, the local sailors (“gentlemen,” noted the newspaper, “because what constituted a gentleman was the performance of gentlemanly acts”) personally chipped in to cast him a silver medal in recognition of everything he’d done for them, despite the many years since Harry had personally sailed. Later, by widespread acclaim, his mayor wrote to the Queen to recommend Harry for the Albert Medal. Due to bureaucracy or who knows why, nothing came of the request.

An unfortunate turn came when Harry loaned his medals to the local church for an exhibition, and as night rolled around, the entire set was stolen by an unknown burglar. Harry was crushed, and the town of Sunderland felt it a slur on their name; the burglar was caught before long, but the medals were melted and gone. A popular movement arose, and within weeks they had struck replacements for the lot, and they returned them with dignity at a town ceremony. There, the thief himself expressed remorse, saying he wished he were drowned; Harry replied, “Mister, if ye were droonin’ aw’d pull ye oot bi th’ neck!”, and refused to press charges against the man.

He was 51 when he was approached to dive 150 deep to effect a mechanical repair. He was a little past such stunts for pay, he said, although of course he’d do so to save a fellow man, and he recommended some others who were younger and more willing. Their diver went down, and contact was soon lost; they returned to Harry and asked him to live up to his words, as nobody else was willing to go down to attempt a rescue.

He suited up and dived. The working depth was perhaps 120 feet, but it was upon a tiny platform across a bored-out shaft which continued another 300 feet past that; anybody who slipped was going a long way down until they looked like a recycled soda can. Feeling around, he located the other diver, who was dead (fainted, probably, then asphyxiated). He resurfaced, reported the news, then dived again to retrieve the body.

At the ripe age of 52, Harry was one of the divers who volunteered to recover bodies after the Tay Bridge disaster. He offered his services for no charge; when the diving commission attempted to pay him afterwards anyway (maybe because he was a million years old and a living legend), he politely refused and asked it be passed to a charity of their choice. (The man got around; somehow he was on hand at the Victoria Hall disaster as well, and widely applauded for his assistance in the aftermath.)

But never mind all that. His last life was saved at age 66. He and his wife were walking along the docks toward their home when he heard the cries of a drowning boy. His wife begged him not to, but he went; relenting, she cried, “Be quick, Harry!” and in he dove. Grab hold, haul over to a rope, out they came.

Thirty six lives. Not bad for a poor old seaman.

 

Harry finally rests

When he was 70, Harry retired at last. And although many people didn’t realize it, his wallet was thin; the diving commission didn’t offer a pension, and he’d quietly turned down others from grateful benefactors. That’s how things were when Andrew Carnegie passed through Sunderland to open a library.

Visiting the local museum, Carnegie saw an exhibit of Harry’s medals and asked after the man, now 84 and still full of vim. Surely he must be a war hero of some kind?

Nope. Just a life saver. When he learned who he was dealing with, and had the pleasure of shaking his hand, Carnegie inducted him into his Hero Fund on the spot.

At long last, Harry Watts no longer had to worry.

In Carnegie’s words,

I have to-day been introduced to a man who has, I think, the most ideal character of any man living on the face of the earth. I have shaken hands with a man who has saved thirty-six lives. Among the distinguished men whose names the Mayor has recited, you should never let the memory of this Sunderland man die. Compared with his acts, military glory sinks into nothing. The hero who kills men is the hero of barbarism; the hero of civilisation saves the lives of his fellows.

At the age of 85, Harry’s town of Sunderland was worried that after his death, such a remarkable, yet humble man might be forgotten in the distance and darkness of history. In response, the mayor and several of the town’s luminaries commissioned a biography to be written about his life. You can read it here, and much of this story came from it.

Not a bad goal. Live your life so that when you’re old, someone will insist on writing a book in your honor.

In their words,

The modest merits of this good citizen may, so far as the public are concerned, be summed up in the simple statement that he has saved upwards of 30 lives from drowning. When we consider what are the awards usually apportioned by mankind to the destroyers of their species, the presentation of a gold watch and chain, accompanied by a framed parchment from the Royal Humane Society, in the precincts of a disused School Room, must appear an inadequate acknowledgment of services so signal. But we are new at the business and shall improve as we go forward.