Mike Argento

margento@ydr.com

The call came in at 19:35 hours – 7:35 p.m. in civilian time – as a cardiac arrest. The age of the patient was not known, according to the dispatcher, nor was her "life status," a term used by emergency workers to describe a person nearing death.

Wendy Tracey was on Interstate 83 when she got the call, driving back to York from her nursing job to report for duty as an EMT/firefighter with York Township's Goodwill Fire Company. She drove directly to the address in her own car.

When she arrived at the house in York Township the police were already on the scene, as was the rescue unit from the fire station, just up the road from the address.

The police officers were performing CPR. A woman standing by was screaming hysterically. There was a belt lying beside the patient.

The patient was young, Tracey could see. The emergency personnel were told she was 17, but she appeared much younger. She was petite.

The one police officer kept performing CPR, even after Tracey had arrived. It was as if he didn't want to give up. He didn't want to stop. The other cop told his partner to let the expert take over. The police officer appeared distraught, Tracey recalled.

Tracey took over and kept administering CPR until the medic unit arrived. One of the paramedics looked the girl's body over. She had lividity and mottling appearing on her legs, an indication that her heart had stopped beating some time ago.

The paramedic called it.

Tracey was there when the police calmed the woman and began talking to her. The woman was the patient's grandmother. One of the cops asked for the girl's date of birth. It turned out the girl, Olivia Perryman, was only 14. He asked about the girl's parents, and the woman said her mother struggled with addiction and her father had died last year – a heroin overdose.

The girl, the woman said, had been having some problems.

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She had suffered from depression and had recently moved in with her grandmother and changed schools. Her grandmother told the police that the kids at school picked on her.

It hit Tracey hard.

In her 27 years as a nurse, and her 15 as an EMT, she has seen a lot. She has seen other suicides. She has seen heroin overdoses. She worked in an ER in Tampa some years back, and she witnessed all variety of trauma that can be inflicted upon the human body.

She always maintained a professional distance, detaching herself from the patients she treated, not allowing emotion to interfere with performing her job.

But this one was different.

She went home from the call and cried for this girl. It was the first time she had ever shed a tear for someone she had treated. She never thought she should cross that line.

This girl's death pushed her across that line.

She had been bullied when she was in elementary school and junior high. She knew what that felt like. She knows that it's not that simple, that the bullying was not the primary cause of the girl's suicide, that these things are more complicated than that. It could have been a factor, sure, but not the only factor. But when she heard the girl's grandmother tell police that the girl had been bullied, it brought back bad memories.

It began when Tracey was in fourth grade at Indian Rock Elementary School. Her father was a city cop, the family lived in working-class Violet Hill. Her classmates were from Wyndham Hills and other wealthier developments. They wore designer clothing. She wore Garanimals.

Her classmates gave her a nickname: "Ugly."

They would spit on her. They would push her around in the hallways. They would rip her books and dump their uneaten food atop hers in the cafeteria.

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Her father told her she had to fight back. It was a different era, almost 40 years ago. Bullying wasn't dealt with as is it is now. She learned to stay quiet, to not speak up, to suffer in quiet desperation. Her father knew something was up when she would come home with a fresh bruise or a torn book.

She hated school. Most days, she didn't want to go. She felt horrible most days. She felt ugly.

Once, she recalled, a girl pushed her down at the bus stop and her brother witnessed it from the house and came to her defense. Her brother always tried to look out for her.

It lasted until she was in seventh grade. She thought it might change. It didn't.

Her father took her out of public school and enrolled her at the Christian School of York. The kids were nice to her there. But she didn't know how to take it. She didn't want anything to do with them. She didn't want to get close to anybody. She figured they were just going to hurt her.

It took her a long time to heal. Even as an adult, it haunted her. She got into an abusive relationship. She suffered through the death of a child. She was suicidal for a while.

But she was able to get her life together, go to nursing school and live her life. She is married – her husband also volunteers at the fire station – and she has a family. She is also a world-record-holding powerlifter. She had never been into fitness and athletics in school; it was always the jocks and the cheerleaders who were the meanest kids.

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She just wants kids who are bullied to realize one thing.

"It doesn't last forever," she said. "It does end."

Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at (717) 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.

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