Curieux, n'est-ce pas? What serendipity to check in at PostSecret, and find this -- by which I mean that the extraordinary challenges faced by workers in the field of emergency medicine seem lately to have found a widespread expression. Be it in the form of this anonymous postcard, be it in the form of a seemingly hateful rant in the blog of a caring EMT, nurse, doctor...
I cannot let my mind go, cannot let my mind's eye imagine what she has seen.
What are the things that one sees in the course of the practice of these professions that shake even a firm faith? Can you tell me? I would like to know, and promise simply to receive the information.
Obviously, my experience only comes from the intersection of my personal emergency with the health care system, and it travels the continuum from near sainted people who did nothing less than save my life to people who delighted in causing me pain. Emergency medicine is far from the sole field in which human nature is so exposed -- raw in its depravity, surprising in its splendor -- but its practitioners seem to feel proprietary, and cling to the resulting pain and awe as their own peculiar reward, or punishment.
It's almost an impossible conversation to have but God bless them for their willingness to try, to begin, and to muck around in the mud trying to translate it all for the rest of us.
Much easier, I know, to interpret an EKG or tally the I & O, bust a clot, stabilize a blood pressure, usher lives in, guide them out...
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