FIRST RESPONDERS:
courageous women on the frontline in emergencies
The jarring, hostile sounds of a man and woman arguing attracted Stephanie Bochorsky’s attention. Dressed in her pyjamas and settling in for a night in front of the television in her Perth home, the off-duty Western Australian police constable immediately leapt from her chair and went to her front door to see what the trouble was.
“The front door to the house across the street was open,” recalls Stephanie, 32. “I could see a man in his underpants walking back and forward and heard his wife saying, ‘No, you don’t have to do that. Don’t be silly.’ He was yelling that somebody was out to get him but it wasn’t out of control. I turned and went back inside. But I was ready if I needed to intervene.”
Stephanie’s readiness saved lives that night and changed her own life forever. The argument across the road suddenly escalated. “The woman began screaming. It was high-pitched, a blood-curdling scream, something I can’t really describe but it chilled me to my bones,” says Stephanie. “But I knew it was real. It wasn’t a pretence.”
Stephanie raced from her front door. The man had disappeared. The woman, dressed in a pink dressing gown, stood alone on the footpath, silhouetted in the light streaming from her front door.
“The woman was pointing inside the house, saying: ‘He’s setting my kids on fire,’” says Stephanie. “I ran inside and as I ran, I told her to call the police. I don’t know what made me do it. I still wonder about that – all I knew was that there was something desperately wrong.”
Stephanie barged through the front door, checking each room as she went down the hallway for the man she’d seen earlier. Then she saw a warm, guttering glow – like the flame from a flickering candle – coming from a bedroom doorway.
The young officer threw open the door. “Against the wall there was a cot. There was a little girl, about three, standing in the cot in the corner of the room,” says Stephanie. “Her head was engorged with flame. Her hair was on fire. The flames rose above her head, a metre or so in the air. All I could smell was petrol. It was the most horrifying, indescribable thing I have ever seen in my life.”
Stephanie Bochorsky is one of Australia’s first responders, a woman prepared to put her life on the line to do her job – to help others in desperate need. Like all first responders – our police, ambulance, paramedic, rescue and fire men and women – she lives a dangerous working life. They all operate in the most challenging environments imaginable, dealing with extreme violence, distress and sometimes death. Sometimes, it’s the life of a citizen. Sometimes, it’s one of their own.
During the past 15 years, 47 first responders have paid the price for their devotion to duty with their lives. Thirty-eight of those fatalities were men; the remaining nine were women. The most common cause of death came from motor vehicle collisions, but first responders also experience significant risk from mental exhaustion, physical and emotional trauma, post-traumatic stress syndrome, even physical assault.
In fact, serious medical claims among Australia’s first responders are four times higher than any other occupation, at a rate of 37.9 claims per 1000 employees – a shocking statistic that speaks to the inflated risks our emergency services personnel run on the community’s behalf every single day.
Added to all that is the knowledge that even a small mistake on their part could cost the life or lives of the people that it’s their job to save. It’s an immense responsibility and little wonder that they endure elevated risks of heightened anxiety, self-doubt, depression and even, in extreme cases, debility and mental breakdown.
Yet, despite this, most first responders are highly motivated individuals, dedicated to their jobs and the wellbeing of others. That dedication is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
To fully grasp the cause-and-effect relationship between first responders and their working lives, you only need consider the horrific scenes encountered by Stephanie Bochorsky inside that child’s bedroom in August 2015.
“When I saw the little girl, I grabbed her and wrapped her up in a blanket from the cot to smother the flames,” Stephanie recalls.
As Stephanie turned, she came face to face with the man she’d seen earlier on the street. He was big, muscular. He had a tin of petrol and a knife and he was standing over another little girl, about eight, who was still in her bed. He glared at Stephanie with a bizarre look in his eyes.
“It’s very difficult to describe what that was like,” she says. “He was disconnected, like he was possessed or having an episode. He was staring at me blankly as he was pouring petrol over the head of his eight-year-old daughter. I yelled at him: ‘What the f**k are you doing? Get away from her ...’ At that moment, I realised I didn’t have anything to protect myself and he was a big guy with a knife. I needed to take control and let him know verbally that
I wasn’t backing down.”
In the calmest of tones, the man said: “Why don’t you take your clothes off?”. At the same time, the little girl in the cot reached up for Stephanie, who scooped her up into her arms. “She was holding on so tight, she was terrified,” says Stephanie. “She was putting her faith and trust in me. I crept forward toward the eight-year-old and said, ‘Come on, sweetie let’s go.’ Petrol was running down her face.”
Stephanie knew she had to act. Clinging to the three-year-old, she reached out, grabbed the eight-year-old by the back of her pyjamas and pulled her out of bed, and ran for the front door.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, he’s right behind us, we’re not going to make it,’” says Stephanie. “But he didn’t follow us. I don’t know why.”
Outside on the footpath, a crowd of neighbours had gathered around the
“I kept telling myself I was fine ... pushed my emotions away.”
shocked mother. Leaving the eight-yearold with her mother and ordering her to call an ambulance, Stephanie took the burned little girl to her home and went straight to the bathroom. She filled the bath with cold water and helped the little girl into it, trying to soothe her and lessen the severity of her burns.
“All her hair was gone, her face and chest were burned, her porcelain skin all charred. Her ear had burned away,” recalls Stephanie. “She was sobbing. She held on to me so tightly. She was trembling in my arms. The image of that little girl will stay with me forever.”
That was three and a half years ago. The man responsible for injuring the little girls – their father – received 17 years in jail. For her bravery that night, Stephanie received the inaugural National Police Bravery Award at a ceremony in Canberra. Even today, Stephanie cannot speak of those events without tears. But those tears, she says, are a good thing – a sign that she has finally accepted what happened to her, as well as the little girls. For years, Stephanie simply refused to acknowledge the there was anything wrong.
“I was in denial for a long time,” says Stephanie, who didn’t seek professional help until six months ago. “I just kept telling myself I was fine and pushed my emotions away. But a few months after it happened, I was having nightmares and couldn’t sleep. I had flashbacks and started to withdraw. My nerves were shot. I had all sorts of negative thoughts about myself. It was taking a toll both physically and emotionally. Finally, it was my fiancé, Scott, who is a detective, who convinced me to get some help. Honestly, without his love and support, I just don’t know how I would have coped.”
Stephanie sees a clinical psychologist each month for post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as a trauma recovery specialist.
“Being a police officer is a very male-dominated profession and one of the things is that you don’t want to appear weak,” says Stephanie. “I guess that’s one of the reasons I didn’t get help straight away. I didn’t want people to think I didn’t have control of my emotions. I’m the sort of person who puts my own issues aside to get on with the job and that wasn’t good for me.
“There is generally a poor understanding of the emotional toll for all members of the emergency services. I think all members of all services should get emotional survival training. Since seeking help, things have turned around for me. I have better relationships and my goals and direction have turned around. I’m in a much better place, and I have my passion back for the job. I took an oath to serve and protect the community and that’s what I am going to keep doing.”
For Amanda Lamont, the most dramatic part of being a volunteer rural firefighter isn’t the buzz of the fire alarm or the hot rush of flames and embers – it’s in the moments after the fire is out that she feels the greatest impact.
“When I am helping to fight a fire, as part of a team, I go into a kind of automatic mode,” says Amanda, 49, a firefighter with the Victorian Country Fire Authority. “The training takes over and I just go through the motions, getting the job done as efficiently as I can.→
“But after that is over, when you stand beside someone who has lost their home and everything they own, that’s when the full force of the emotions hit you. I’ve walked with people through the ashes of their home and listened as they talk about what they have lost and the memories that their home held and it’s always deeply moving. It’s not the television sets or the wardrobes that matter to people as much as the irreplaceable photographs or a ring that once belonged to a grandmother or a wedding gown. They’re the intimate losses that people feel in their hearts.”
Amanda joined the firies five years ago when she moved to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria. “I live in a home surrounded by bush,” she says. “I was very aware of the risks associated with that kind of environment because my father was a firefighter and a ranger with the National Parks Service, so I grew up with the idea of firefighting and community service deeply embedded in my psyche.
“When I moved to the Dandenongs, I realised that if my house was in the path of a fire, then I would be relying on volunteers to come and help me, so I decided that I should help others out, too. Everyone in my family is a volunteer of some kind – Dad is still a volunteer firefighter, Mum is a St John’s ambulance volunteer and my sister is in the State Emergency Service. I think we all volunteer because we think it’s the right thing to do.”
Amanda sees her role as much more that fighting fires. She is trained in helping people deal with the trauma that fires cause. “Saving lives is of course our first priority, but we are also trained in supporting people during that recovery phase. I’ve stood beside a woman as her house burned to the ground and that is a deeply traumatic experience. The support we give in those moments is really important.”
Amanda is deeply concerned about the impact of climate change on the frequency and intensity of bushfires in Australia. “The bushfire season is getting longer and hotter, there is no doubt,” she says. “What we are beginning to see is not just a disaster that begins and ends but a series of disasters that merge into each other. As first responders, what we worry most about is how we will resource this in the future.”
Sandy Macken, 37, is a NSW paramedic and she, too, knows the far-reaching effects and impact of emotional stress. She has dealt with all kinds of trauma during her 16 years in the ambulance service – from car accident victims to gunshot wounds and everything in between. But the memory that haunts her most is of a young man who took his own life.
“I’ve always had a deep passion for serving others and that passion drives my love of this job, but the truth is that this job is about dealing with life and death,” says Sandy.
One morning, at the beginning of her career, she and her partner attended an apparent suicide in which a young man was found hanging in an apartment that he shared with his girlfriend. “When we arrived, the girlfriend was having a kind of psychotic episode,” recalls Sandy. “She was angry and grief-stricken and hysterical, and was throwing flower pots off the balcony. It was hugely confronting.
“The young man’s body had been cut down and was on the couch. He was
“The support we give in those moments is really important.”
clearly dead. I could tell within a few seconds of examining him that he was gone. His lips were blue. Sometimes, if you enter a scene and leave again quickly you can avoid becoming too emotionally involved. But when you are there for a while, another story starts to emerge and what was just another job becomes a real-life story.”
For Sandy, the reality began when the young man’s mother arrived. She too was grief-stricken.
“The mother walked straight in, straight past the other ambulance officer and the six police officers and even the girlfriend,” recalls Sandy. “She didn’t even see me, despite the fact that I was sitting right next to her son. She only had eyes for him. She sat on the coffee table next to her son and started to speak to him.
“’Oh, my darling baby boy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know. I never knew, honey. Why didn’t you tell me you were so depressed? All you had to do was say something. I love you. I’ll always love you. Why didn’t you tell me how much you were suffering, my sweet, sweet boy ...’”
For Sandy, it was beautiful and terrible all at the same time. “I felt useless, paralysed,” says Sandy. “She was so tender with him – her mother’s love released for all of us to see and feel. And then she started to sing him a lullaby. She cradled him in her arms and rocked him back and forth as she must have done when he was little. Everyone in the room was crying, tears streaming down their faces – my partner, the policemen. Finally, I made an excuse about taking the equipment downstairs. When I got outside, my emotions opened like a flood gate and I started sobbing. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t. It was all too real.”
That raw experience, says Sandy, has stayed with her across the years. “It reminds me now that I am a member of the human race first and a paramedic second. It reminds me that we are all human and that we all feel emotions and that we should feel them, not push them away.”
Pushing away her emotions was, for many years, Sandy’s coping mechanism. She’d seek solace and forgetfulness in alcohol, but there came a time when even that didn’t keep the nightmares at bay.
“I had a dream that I was arriving at an accident and there was a woman trapped inside a car,” says Sandy. “She was bleeding quite badly, and I was trying to get to her to save her, but somehow I couldn’t reach her and I kept trying and trying. She was screaming and frightened but I couldn’t reach her. Then I fall and hit my head and as I pass out, I know I’ve failed her. I had that nightmare over and over. I’d wake up heaving in sweat.”
It wasn’t until Sandy finally sought out a spiritual answer that she managed to resolve her inner conflicts. And eventually she collected her experiences and the lessons she had learnt into a book, Paramedic: the Remarkable Resilience of the Human Spirit. “There’s been a lot of self-contemplation,” she says, “a lot of thinking. Our work is confronting but others need us to do it. That is what keeps me in the job. I finally accepted the job for what it is. There is a darkness and a lightness to it. You see death and injury, but you also get to see humanity at its best, like that day when I saw that mother’s expression of love and grief. That was pure and deeply moving. I felt honoured that I was able to see that, to share that. It helps me remember that I do this to help others.”
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available through Lifeline: 13 11 14, lifeline.org.au, and Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636, beyondblue.org.au.