It was 1:33am. The rain had slowed, but not stopped. We were parked at on standby, being the last truck available in the county. Waiting for the next call. My partner was half-asleep against the window, radio volume turned down just enough. I was staring at the steering wheel like it might eventually say something important.
We hadn’t carried a patient all night. One lift assist. Two cancelled calls. That was it.
And yet, I was exhausted. Not the kind of tired that’s earned, the kind that comes after CPR or a backboard carry down some stairs. This was a different kind. The tired like you’ve been holding your breath for no reason.
Nobody talks about nights like these. Maybe because they don’t make good stories. Maybe because we don’t know what to say about a shift where nothing happens. Except somehow everything still does.
We tell ourselves we signed up for the action. The rush and crackle of the tones that no one understood, followed by that moment of clarity. Grab your gear, your coffee, book on, swear and sweat. That’s the part you train for, the part you can explain at dinner parties. But those calls are rare.
Most of the job is quiet. Still and suspended. And it’s there, in the long pauses, that something else sets in.
People outside this work think the trauma is loud. But I’ve found it’s often the silence that stays with me. The way time stretches between calls, the sound of your own thoughts bouncing off the inside of the skull. The endless pacing in the garage. The way you start to feel like old furniture.
You learn to sit with yourself on slow nights. To scroll without seeing, sip cold coffee, start and stop the same conversation three times. You learn to be still, even when your body is bracing for movement. And you start to wonder if this waiting counts for anything at all.
Here’s my thought. There’s a different kind of weight to being ready but unused. Present, but invisible. On shift, but untouched. It drains you all the same.
We talk so much about trauma, but not about the dilution. The slow dissolve of purpose when you spend hours prepared to act and never asked to. It chips at you differently.
And it’s not just us. I think about teachers sitting in empty classrooms, waiting on a kid who never shows. About nurses who hover at bedsides, listening for a bell that doesn’t come. About anyone who stays on long after the rest of the world turns off.
Maybe that’s the most human thing of all. staying. Even when nothing happens.
Ghosts of the Navigator 