Barbara Lawlor, Nederland. You're driving up Boulder Canyon, eager to get home, when you round a curve and see a line of cars stopped in the road. It's hot and you are in a hurry, but you have to wait. Soon, the line starts to move and as you creep forward you see the blue and red lights that have stopped traffic.

Drivers slow down, trying to see what happened, see if someone they know was involved in the accident. They inch past the ambulance, the fire engines, the police patrol cars, the sheriff's investigators, until the traffic speeds up and they are free to go home. You think maybe you'll check up later, make sure if your family and friends are okay.

In your rear view mirror, the emergency first responders are still at the scene. They are working on a patient, stabilizing torsos and limbs from further injury. They are trying to keep hysterical friends from the scene. They are hoping they do everything right as they carry litters uphill, downhill, across creeks; as they look under upside down cars hoping they don't see a body.

When the injured or dead are transported and the scene is cleared, those who arrived first, those who put their lives on the line to help victims, are left to go home, to wonder how it all turned out; to face sleepless nights haunted by not succeeding at what was impossible to do, to save a life when it was already gone.

The men and women who are first responders, who have the medical training to deal with emergencies, with injuries, with fire victims, suicidal persons, heart attacks and drug and alcohol overdoses see the bad stuff on a regular basis. They are trained to react to the situation, to fix a person as best they can before the sick and injured are taken somewhere else.

Then these people have to deal with their own feelings, their emotional reactions to the scene that played out before them.

Eric Abramson is one of these people. He is a captain with the Nederland Fire Protection District, and by trade he is a videographer and producer of documentary films. Two years ago when a Boulder County Sheriff's deputy committed suicide after his internal struggle with a fatality shooting, Abramson and fellow officers and firefighters all wondered what they could have done, how they could have helped—what could have changed the course of the deputy's action.

Abramson says that there are not enough mental health programs available for first responders who undergo post traumatic stress disorder. There are programs set up for the military, for veterans, but not for those civilians who work in emergency services.

Gathering his experience as a firefighter and his expertise in film making, Abramson has initiated a documentary film, Wounded Without Weapons, and is in the fundraising stage. He needs to get the backing to make it a quality production, a film which he hopes would be distributed to every firehouse in the country.

Abramson says, "The film will be a good place to get people talking, to offer help. We so seldom see what happens after we treat someone at the scene of an accident or injury. We are involved in life-threatening decisions all the time."

Recently, Abramson received a thank-you letter from a person who could have died from a medical issue while hiking up the Fourth of July trails. The team of rescuers reached her and decided she needed a Flight for Life and set up a landing zone. The woman was flown to a hospital and saved. Abramson keeps the letter on his tablet as a reminder that there are happy endings.

The woman wrote that the team saved her life and she would have a second chance to be a better person.

After 20 years as a firefighter, Abramson says he has saved three lives and seen hundreds of deaths. He came to Nederland in 1994 and joined the department in 1995.

He says his grandfather was rejected by the army in World War II and joined the Civil Defense Corps, so he invited his grandson to spend time hanging out at the fire station. When Abramson was in high school he joined the Appalachian Mountain Club in New Hampshire and did back-country search and rescue. Within two weeks he experienced his first fatality.

Death wasn't new to him. He grew up on a farm and experienced the life and death of animals; he wasn't afraid of blood. When Abramson came to Boulder to attend CU, he moved to Ned. He remembers when he was living in Old Town and his house flooded, the Ned volunteer firefighters came to pump it out.

"One of them saw my Search and Rescue gear and said I should join the department," he says. So he did.

He remembers that PTSD didn't seem to be a big issue before 9/11, but then he began to pay attention, hearing what the New York firefighters and police officers went through after the towers went down.

"Brutal, horrific things catch up with people," he says. "Watching someone die on the highway when there is nothing we can do stays with us. What else could I have done? We carry a burden of something we can't share on the outside. This is a small town. We often know the people we try to help."

Abramson says the suicide rate is higher in fire services than the national average. PTSD brings anger, alcoholism, and withdrawal from society. A person who is constantly involved with the disasters and tragedies in their work relates to the world differently. "You become intolerant of people complaining about stupid things. Day to day problems are nothing compared to what other people go through."

One of the down sides about living in the mountains, says Abramson, is that we are farther away from a hospital than those in the city. More often than not, those patients who are in critical condition don't make it because they are hard to reach, hard to be transported from precarious positions.

After being at the site of seven fatal motorcycle accidents in Boulder Canyon, Abramson remembers every one of them when he goes down the mountain. In some places there are crosses; in others, the images that still pop into his head. It reminds him to go slow when he is on his own motorcycle.

"I need to leave a legacy, something bigger to say with my life. And I have a platform. I want to talk to firefighters, volunteers, and find out what it's like to deal with traumatic events when they have no tools, no one to talk to. I want to be able to give them options."

In his own family, Abramson had a great-uncle who at Pearl Harbor during the invasion. He along with others in his crew jumped overboard. He watched while sharks attacked half of them. "He was silent for 30 years, never said a word. They used to call it shell-shock. He had nowhere to go, no one to talk to."

It's time to get silent voices out in the open, says Abramson. He says it will be a group effort. The first step will be research and initial interviews, creating a short teaser to have ready for grants and fundraisers. His goal is $500,000 for the completed film and he needs to raise $20,000 to take the first steps.

"We will save lives with this film," says Abramson. "If everybody in Nederland gave us something, it will help out." Two-thirds of the estimated cost will go to the actual filming and the other third will go to outreach, to getting the film out there and getting on-line resources.

"We don't deal with our cumulative trauma," says Abramson. "I hope this film will enable people to understand and deal with the issues. Now I have to come up with the money and get it going."