EMS Support offers hope of healing

Special Report: Unseen and Unspoken

WAVY 10 News
By: Marielena Balouris
Posted: Jan 24, 2019

"The world got really dark. It was gray. There was no color, I felt no joy. I had absolutely no sense of the future. It dawned on my one day that I wasn't willing to fight to save my life." Lisa Crouch

PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) -- Imagine experiencing the worst moments of someone else's life -- every single day at work.

That's what many first responders do on a daily basis.

For Lisa Crouch, those traumatic experiences started to add up.

A career firefighter and paramedic, she dedicated her life to helping people in our community.

But what happened when everyone else's traumatic events started to affect her?

"You're afraid to go to sleep at night, because you know the nightmares are coming," Crouch said. "So you don't go to sleep, because you're fighting sleep because you're scared of the nightmares. But when you do fall asleep, you have the nightmares. And then you wake up the next day, and you're a mess."

Crouch spent 20 years working as a firefighter and paramedic in the Hampton Roads area. After decades of dealing with trauma, something shifted.

"The world got really dark. It was gray. There was no color, I felt no joy," said Crouch. I had absolutely no sense of the future. It dawned on my one day that I wasn't willing to fight to save my life."

Doctors found nothing physically wrong, but Crouch new something was off.

Then came her first suicide attempt.

"Die, be miserable for the rest of my life, or I can make something good out of this hell I went through," Crouch said.
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