An Alberta Health Service paramedic suffered the cruellest blow when a teenage girl fatally injured in a car accident was revealed to be her daughter.
Jayme Erickson shared the story on her Facebook page, which is every parent’s – and paramedic’s – worst nightmare.
At 4:30pm on November 15, she wrote, she was sent with her partner to a motor vehicle crash west of Airdrie that injured two patients, including the passenger in a vehicle who was trapped and seriously injured.
Erickson wrote that she did everything she could to help the critically injured passenger while firefighters worked to extricate the passenger from the vehicle.
Eventually, the passenger was removed from the vehicle and a STARS air ambulance transported him to Foothills Medical Clinic.
“My shift was over and I went home,” Erickson wrote.
A short time later there was a knock on her door.
“RCMP came to my door to inform me that my daughter had been in an accident,” she wrote.
Then it hit her.
“The seriously injured patient I was tending to was my own flesh and blood,” she wrote. “My only child. My mini me. My daughter Montana. Her injuries were so terrible I didn’t even recognize her.”
Erickson wrote that officers took her to Foothills, where she was told Montana’s injuries were “incompatible with life.”
“We are overcome with grief and absolutely disappointed,” she said. “The pain I feel is like no pain I have ever felt, it is indescribable.
“My worst nightmare as a paramedic has come true.”
Erickson said this Saturday that she said goodbye to her daughter.
“I can’t help but be angry for the short time I’ve had with her,” she wrote. “17 years wasn’t long enough. Although I’m grateful for the 17 years I had with her,
“I’m shocked and wondering. What would have become of you my little girl?” She said. “Who would you have been? I’ll never see you graduate and walk the stage, I’ll never see you get married, I’ll never know who you would have been. I love you more than anything in this world (yes, including the goats, my girl!).
“I will cherish the memories we made and the time we had together,” she said. “I’m shaken. i am broken I’m missing a piece of myself. I have to pick up the pieces and keep going.”
A spokesman for the family agreed to share the story with CTV News.
In her last words, Erickson offered this reflection.
“Love with all my heart,” she said. “Hold her close. Make memories. ‘If you want to love someone, hold on as long and as hard as you can…until you can’t anymore.'”
An official Go Fund Me page to help the family will be created and published tomorrow.