Alberta firefighter struggled with PTSD for 8 years, came out 'on the other side'

Ward Redwood avoided this spot for years — four white crosses set in a ditch off a two-lane road on the southern edge of Grande Prairie, Alta.

Despite being a firefighter for 30 years, Redwood didn't know much about post-traumatic stress disorder when he responded to a fatal car crash here in fall 2011. But the recurring nightmares, flashbacks and descent into an emotional flat-line over the next eight years taught him all he needed to know about PTSD.

Listen to Redwood talk about his experience with PTSD

"[This crash] just filled me up and overwhelmed me, and just ended up being the one to shorten my career," Redwood said. "This ended up being the big one."

The latest statistics show one in five frontline public safety workers in Canada will develop PTSD over the course of their careers. Nearly half will develop a mental disorder.

After years of struggle and months of therapy — and at a time when first responders across Canada advocate for support to combat the mental health crisis in their ranks — Redwood wants to tell his story. 

"I know there are people out there that would probably benefit from hearing this story and know there is a way out," he said. "You just need to ask for help."

• Researchers find significantly higher rate of mental disorders among first responders
• 'It's not good enough': Rural Alberta's first responders need help handling trauma, peer network says

The 'big one' 

It all started during an overnight shift on Oct. 22, 2011, which happened to be Redwood's 51st birthday. 

Just after midnight, a group of 15- and 16-year-old football players left a high school party in Grande Prairie. The driver pulled off the two-lane road to make a U-turn. As the car crossed the centre line, a pickup truck slammed into the driver's side at 120 km/h.

By the time Redwood's crew arrived, firefighters on the scene had confirmed two boys were dead and another was seriously injured — two black tags and one red tag, in firefighter parlance.

The first crew tended to a boy in the passenger seat and prepared the Jaws of Life. Blankets shrouded the bodies of the young driver and another passenger on the ground. 

Meanwhile, the pickup truck was upside down on the road, the engine still running. The driver had likely left the scene, the fire commander told Redwood. But just to be sure, Redwood grabbed a thermal imaging camera from his rescue truck and scanned the brush off the road, in case the driver had collapsed nearby. 

With no sign of the driver, Redwood returned to the truck. A police officer asked him how the thermal camera worked and Redwood obliged. He aimed the camera at a group of firefighters — white silhouettes lighting up the screen — and then slowly directed it toward the lifeless brush near the car.

In the cool darkness, a light flashed on the screen. 

"I can still remember it. It was just like this ... adrenalin moved through me. My brain said, 'That's a deer,' but I knew it was another boy," Redwood said.  

He ran toward the body, turned on his flashlight and was met with the unmoving eyes of another boy. Redwood fetched a paramedic, who confirmed there was no pulse.

"At this scene, I went up expecting two black tags and one red tag, and now all of a sudden there's another one," Redwood said. "It shocked me."

He started talking to himself, trying to ease the surge of adrenalin.

He cast the camera back toward the woods. Within seconds, another white signature appeared on the screen. 

"Sure enough, it's another boy," Redwood said. "I was relieved his eyes were closed."

'Don't let that stuff bother you'

The city mourned the four boys and rallied around the survivor. The driver of the pickup spent 15 months in jail on dangerous driving convictions.

Meanwhile, Redwood did what he had been instructed to do back when he was a rookie firefighter. "Push it down and don't think about it, don't let that stuff bother you — that's how I was trained," he said. "Back in the day, that's all we did."  

Redwood joined the department full-time in 1989, drawn toward the camaraderie and dignity of the fire service. He made the analogy that "if a firefighter is building a house, he doesn't build it alone."

But the sentiment had its limits back then, particularly when it came to workplace trauma. The prevailing attitude around mental health, to the extent it was recognized, was that it was a private issue.  

There was greater awareness of it by 2011, but the level of support Redwood received after the crash wasn't enough. 

In the immediate aftermath, Redwood debriefed at the station with about a dozen other firefighters who had responded to the call. But that was it. No followup.

Three weeks after the crash, Redwood separated from his wife of 19 years. The marriage was already in trouble, he said, but the emotional fallout from the crash drained him of the energy needed to heal the relationship. He became a single dad to two daughters at the same time that his own father's dementia got worse, prompting them to move in together. 

"As I know, looking back, I had already suppressed it," Redwood said of the crash. "I just crawled into a hole."

'Every bit of me is starting to deteriorate'

Redwood stayed in that hole until his 56th birthday, exactly five years after the crash. Just past midnight, a nightmare brought the trauma roaring back. "How does your subconscious do all that work and you don't have a clue?" he said.

In the dream, Redwood was back at the scene of the crash. Except this time, he was looking over two bodies, side by side. Their eyes were open, mouths were moving, but no sound was coming out. 

It was worse than the crash itself, he said. 

Afterwards, Redwood tried to rein in the stress with the looming fear that the nightmare would haunt his sleep again. 

While working an overnight shift in April 2017, a pickup truck rolled over on a highway in Grande Prairie and the driver was thrown from the vehicle. When his crew arrived, Redwood noticed a car seat in the back. He knew he had to use the thermal imaging camera to search for a child.

As he turned to get the camera from the fire truck, he froze. 

"Every part of my body had this dull feeling," he said. "I feel like I'm in quicksand." 

He was able to fight through and finish the search, but the other firefighters noticed his freeze-up. 

"Every bit of me was starting to deteriorate," Redwood said.

After that call, he decided to reach out to a peer-support mental health volunteer within the fire service, an option that hadn't been available in 2011.

Grande Prairie became one of three departments in Alberta to introduce the program in 2013. Dozens of other departments have since followed suit. 

The peer-support volunteer suggested Redwood make an appointment with a psychologist in Edmonton. The psychologist told him the symptoms were likely a result of too much coffee and general workplace stress, and told Redwood to take a few weeks off. 

"I was treading water a little bit," Redwood said. He started to notice slight changes in his behaviour. Memory problems. Sleepless nights. A short attention span. 

Then, on an early-morning call in November 2017, Redwood froze up a second time while using the thermal imaging camera. Again he was overcome by a dull, quicksand-like sensation. 

"I know now, deep in my heart, that something's wrong and I'm pretty sure I know what it is. What else could it be?" Redwood said about that time. "It's not workplace stress and too much coffee." 

Toward therapy

Redwood had been a captain on the fire department for nearly three decades. He was used to making forceful, confident decisions. But when it came to his mental health, he was stuck in a fog.

He had another conversation with a peer-support volunteer and Redwood's union president put him in touch with a highly regarded psychologist in Calgary. 

Within 30 minutes of meeting Redwood, the psychologist was ready to make a diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

"It was a relief," Redwood said. "It's like if you had two broken legs and you were crawling around for weeks and you didn't know what the heck you were crawling around for, but now someone told you that your two legs are broken."

The Workers Compensation Board of Alberta eventually approved his claim. He was ordered off work. He started eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy in Grande Prairie. But his symptoms started getting worse.

He felt adrenalin shocks while pulling up at random intersections in his car. He panicked at the sound of sirens.  

By August 2018, the WCB case worker connected Redwood with Steve Buckle, a Grande Prairie occupational therapist who offered prolonged exposure therapy. The therapy amounted to Redwood repeatedly narrating his traumas until he no longer feared the memory or associated cues.

Buckle told him if he could work his way through the 2011 incident, other traumas would also start to fade.

The sessions were gruelling. Redwood broke down in uncontrollable sobs the first time he told Buckle about the crash. He recorded the sessions and listened back at home. With headphones on and eyes closed, Redwood would be transported back to the crash site. 

As expected, his symptoms got worse. On the eve of his birthday in 2018, Redwood had another nightmare. It was the same as the first, except instead of the boys looking up at him, it was his two daughters. 

The effects of that nightmare were worse than the crash and his first nightmare. Over time, the adrenalin shocks and panic attacks suffocated his capacity to experience joy. Music, sports, family — nothing moved the needle.  

"The feeling of love had totally gone away. I had no feeling of love for quite some time. Like, years," he said. He began to think "maybe I'm just going to live with it for the rest of my life." 

Unearthing a memory

As part of his therapy with Buckle, Redwood started to visit the fire station. He held the thermal imaging camera and talked about finding the boys. He even took the rescue truck back to the crash site.

His story started to get longer, too, as he grappled with the fear of the nightmares and freeze-ups. It also became easier to tell.

"Basically, it gets boring," Redwood said. "You talk about it so much and the symptoms start to go away." 

Weeks into therapy, after recounting the story so often, Redwood remembered something new: That he actually froze up on the night of the crash, just like he did in 2017. From the deep layers of his subconscious, he had unearthed what felt like the last repressed memory.

"I had no memory of it whatsoever and all of a sudden it came back," he said. "It really was a turning point." 

Redwood knew his condition had changed two weeks later when he dropped his daughter at her mom's place after school. He helped her with her bags and gave her a hug. In that moment, he was overcome by a deep, unshakeable feeling of love — something that had escaped him for years.

"It was like a switch turned right at that moment. I was ecstatic," he said. "The feeling of love — a lot of people don't understand that when it's not there, how flat-lined you are. But when it comes back, there's no pill out there that can give you that feeling."

Full circle or the other side

Redwood wanted the story of his recovery to come full circle. He wanted to get back in the captain's seat. 

He started to reintegrate at work in the spring of 2019. He was given shorter days, mostly to help out around the fire hall and tell his story to colleagues, waiting for the day he was ready to go back out on a call. 

His symptoms had fallen away. No more shocks at random intersections. No more panic attacks at the sound of sirens.

Just before he was slated to return to active service, he started to consider a different ending.  

"When you're that happy and you're that joyful and you've come through that bit of a dark, flat place, you just want to stay there," he said. 

So at the end of August, Redwood handed in his retirement notice. 

He took an extended holiday until Nov. 20, at which point, a fire truck picked Redwood up at his house and took him to the station for his last official day as a firefighter.

He hopes his candid talk about mental health around the fire station will outlast his time on the service. 

"It was emotionally draining. It was physically draining. Every part of me hurt sometimes. But it gets better." 

Redwood recently celebrated his 59th birthday. It was an important one, he said. 

"No nightmares this time," he wrote in a followup email. "For me, it helps prove to myself that I am truly on the other side of this thing."