I dream of dispatch

Get out of my dreams, get into my action movie

I dream of dispatching. Still. Not always. Not, like, every night, I was a 911 operator and police and fire dispatcher for 20 years and even though I’ve been away from it for nearly 5 years, I have recurring dreams about it. I’m not naive, I realize if anyone did a thing for decades it becomes part of their makeup forever. I’m not shocked, for example, when my wife hears the gossip around our building about the police response when the middle aged man down the hall had another argument with his mother. When I’m driving around town and see the police handling a car accident, I don’t feel the need to slow down and rubberneck as I pass. Why not, if possible, dart in another direction to avoid and not contribute to the traffic snarl that’s been created? When I see fire equipment somewhere my instinct is to guess the problem from my passing vantage. Two engines, a truck and a shift boss at an apartment building? Probably a fire alarm. Single engine in front of a home? Looks like a carbon monoxide detector activation. But those are real world, daily scenarios. The dreams leave me confused.

There’s one I’ve had where I’m alone in a patrol car. I’m an officer on patrol. It’s winter and it’s night time. I’m driving around the city but I can’t seem to get away from the station. Left turn, right turn, BAM I’m in front of the station. I’m out of the car checking on a open garage door. I exit the garage, BAM I’m in the alley behind the station. I’m having a coffee break with another officer. We walk out of the coffee shop, BAM I’m walking out of a side door of the station.

Another one is me walking around inside the police station. I have a destination, but I’m never sure in the dream where I’m going. As I’m walking I keep finding distractions. An officer wants to talk to me as I pass the squad room. A sergeant has a question for me as I pass their office. I’m stopped on the stairs by a civilian looking for directions to a conference room. I come across a puddle in a hallway from a ceiling leak and have to notify property standards and wait by the puddle for a response. I never get to where I’m going and I never find out where that is.

Another dream is, I’m sure, common to a lot of people. I’m running late. In reality, I was never late. Not one day in 20 years. It’s a family trait I’m actually pretty proud of. In the dream I’m running late to my shift. I’m climbing a long flight of white iron stairs, the rubber soles of my patent leather uniform shoes making that light metallic ‘ping’ on every iron step. I get to the top and now have to traverse a long, winding, narrow path between these giant white steam tanks. They look like giant 25 foot tall white pill capsules. They’re connected by thick horizontal steam pipes that hiss as I’m squeezing by them. The 911 center seems to be located in some kind of industrial plant. It all resembles the setting of the final fight scene from some 80’s action flick. Any second now the bad guy will jump out from behind the giant white tank and take a swing at me with an oversized wrench that I’ll duck. His swing will strike the tank rupturing it and spewing hot steam into his face. He will have a bubbly, blistered face for the remainder of the fight until I manage to entangle him with a nearby dangling chain that will strangle his last breath out of him. Very Die Hard / Lethal Weapon. Anyway, I digress. In the dream I emerge from the maze of pipes to a clearing with a windowed room in the middle, like the foreman’s office in a factory. That’s the 911 center I’m headed to. I never learn if I made it on time or not.

Another dream is in the same setting. The 911 center in the industrial plant. I’m there and I’ve come out of retirement. My former and now current boss is welcoming me back. The room is a mixture of new dispatchers I don’t know and old dispatchers I used to work with. The center is like it was when I started the job in 2001. Not the remodeled room from later in my career. I pick a radio position to sit at. A bunch of the equipment doesn’t work. My computer crashes. My phone won’t make outgoing calls. My computer aided dispatch program won’t update. I keep looking over at my boss in his office and he just looks back at me and nods, like, ‘you’re good. You got it’. The new dispatchers I don’t know are watching my every move and second guessing me. Questioning what I’m doing and why I’m doing it over and over until one of the old dispatchers I know tells them to give me some space, ‘he knows what’s he’s doing’. Do I?

The most common recurring dream I have is this one. I’m in the station with a bunch of officers. Sometimes they’re just nameless, faceless officers and sometimes they are real officers I know. We are all in our police uniforms. We hear a loud whistle blow, like a train whistle. It means lunchtime. We all start to walk to the break room and suddenly I notice the station is more like a dirty, dusty, dark factory. All of our uniforms are covered in soot. We sit at picknick table benches, like the ones we used to sit and eat lunch at in summer camp. The lights are all dusty, dirty hanging light fixtures that creak and flicker. We all have sack lunches from home and our dirty, sooty hands and faces make the white bread of our sandwiches turn black but we eat them anyway. We eat quickly and even though there are no conversations going on, we’re all smiling and chuckling. Little quiet, under the breath chortles like we’re all privy to the same private joke.

I’m not a dream expert so I don’t know what all of those mean but I can guess some of it. Belonging, being accepted, doubting my abilities, being lost, not having a place, all of that stuff. I don’t know the source of these insecurities. Is part of it PTSD? Maybe. I’ve never had that diagnoses. I don’t feel traumatized. But when I have one of these dreams, I don’t wake up feeling very good about it. I don’t feel rested. I feel uneasy like I’ve been up worrying all night.

Life is stress. Work is stress. Everything is stress. How a person copes with stress often dictates who they are or, at least, their personality. My old job was stressful, like everyone’s. I worked graveyard which meant long stretches of inactivity punctuated by loud, jarring disruptions that could last from 5 minutes to several hours depending on what the emergency is. Often there were more than one at a time. There’s a lot of adrenaline involved when someone has to make a lot of decisions and reactions, many important, is a short amount of time. I used to handle that pressure pretty well when I was a younger dispatcher, I thought. An event would wind down and I just went back to reading my book or chatting with my partners or tending to a hobby I brought in to work that night. Somewhere during my career that changed.

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

I spent a lot of my 20 year career disliking my job. Everyone dislikes their job. Sure, they’re happy when they find one they can stomach and they feel blessed and lucky if they can find one focusing on something they really love. But even those lucky people have job aspects they hate. Decisions that get made over their paygrades that they now have to implement or deal with. Co workers that are difficult. Work and life balance problems. These are the same in every job in every field. But somewhere during my career by dislike morphed into dread, Dread is different than dislike. Dread adds an element of fear to it. Dread is watching the clock tick closer and closer to when you have to leave for work and making your stomach upset worrying about leaving. Dread is Coming to the realization that you only have a hour left before leaving for work but at least you have the 15 minute drive to try to relax. Dread is getting to work early so you have another 15 minutes to hide in the car before going inside. I used to bring in things to do during the long 12 hour shifts but late in my career I just sat and waited for a phone to ring and when it did it made me jump or flinch. My first feeling upon learning there was a new procedure or policy change I had to learn and implement was to worry about fucking it up and would I get written up and wasn’t there another e-mail earlier in the week with another addendum to another change in the SOP I’m forgetting and did I fuck THAT one up too and there’s been too many policy changes this month and I can’t seem to keep up with all the e-mails and changes and there’s no way I didn’t fuck something up tonight and I’m getting written up. For sure. I was no longer coping with my work stress very well. I was afraid of my job.

I suffer from a condition called Cushing’s disease. It’s considered a rare disease. Something like 7-15 people per million get it but it’s getting diagnosed more often now so it might be more common than previously believed. It’s a hormonal disorder caused by a benign tumor, called an adenoma, on my pituitary gland that produces excess adrenocorticotropic hormone, That’s a long, difficult word so it’s always referred to as ATHC. The ATHC makes my adrenal glands release too much cortisol. There are physical symptoms, sure, but also symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. Cortisol is often called the stress hormone because it helps the body respond to stressful events. If this all sounds familiar, you might have heard about actor and comedian Amy Schumer’s struggles with it in the media. Hers was caused by high dose steroids she was prescribed for an unrelated medical treatment. It seems with some alterations to her medications she is recovering. Mine is usually treated surgically and I’ve done that twice. I wrote about it previously here. I always intended there to be a part 2 to that but I don’t know when or if I’ll do that. My condition is largely being controlled by medications that limit my cortisol but in the long run, I’ll probably have to have radiation treatments to be rid of tumor. My previous surgeries were only resections, basically a removing of part of the tumor to relieve the swelling that was causing the more acute visual symptoms I was suffering at those times. A full surgical removal won’t work in my case because the tumor has snuggled into a warm, comforting position in and around my optic nerves making it too dangerous to remove completely. Hopefully, those acute visual symptoms stay under control so I don’t need any more resections. Recovering from those sucked. Anyway, until all that happens, I’ll just continue to to rock my hump, my hump, my lovely Cushing’s lump. It’s a symptom.

My wife, Sam D. and I discuss it from time to time. Did my transition from disliking my job to dreading it coincide with the tumor and my stress hormone changes? There’s really no way I’ll ever know how long I’ve had the tumor or when it started forming. If it wasn’t there, would I still be working in the center? Would I still be going every day (or night) to a job I simply dislike? If the tumor ever gets fully resolved would I ever consider going back? Would the City of Evanston even want me back? I didn’t exactly leave on the best terms with the city. I was out of sick benefits and was missing too much time with no pay. Human resources classified me as AWOL from duty and was going to start looking to replace me if I couldn’t start showing up. That was the city’s HR reaction. My actual agency, the Evanston Police and especially my direct supervisor always had my back and supported me when I was going through the worst of it and recovery. My co-workers were also a little tired of my act, repeatedly covering my frequent and occasionally long absences on and off for a year or two. The truth is I don’t think I would go back or pursue a similar job elsewhere. Too much time has passed. I’m almost 50 and I don’t want that stress anymore. My wife doesn’t want all those nights alone anymore. I don’t want to fight bad guys in an industrial steam plant anymore. I’m too old for that shit.