A look into the job

One of the things that people ask me a lot is, "What is your job like?" or "Is it scary?" and I think... Hmm what can I say to really knock this person's socks off... And you know, sometimes I really have to struggle to find a good story because that's what they're looking for. I was the same way when I started out... Looking for the guts and glory. And it doesn't exist. Well at least not in the degree people expect it to. I guess I do have a part in an extraordinary job in that I deal with things most people wouldn't dream of, but if you think about it, I am just doing my job.

I can only think off the top of my head of a few real hair raising calls, and most of them weren't really hair raising at all. I used to think that taking ventilator patients would scare the fuck out of me - and the first couple times, yeah, I was nervous about it. But after I learned about the physiology of it, it's just another therapy.

It's hard for me to grasp this concept at times, that people think my job is something special. I really love it, don't get me wrong, but I'm just another shlep out there doing what I have to do to make a living. Maybe what they see is the fact that I advocate for the patient, I don't know. I would hardly ever credit myself with saving someone's life. Maybe that will come along some day, but for now, I just keep the patient going between hospitals, cause that's my job.

At the same time, I can't resist glorifying it some days, because I like to see people's reactions. I occasionally will offer someone a ride-along to see their reaction, and mostly its always the same... "I couldn't handle the blood and guts." But you know the funny thing is, when I was doing 911 in Texas - there was rarely any blood and guts... The bloodiest call I had, ironically was a Hep B positive patient who got the shit beat out of him with a lead pipe. I just did the job, you know?

I think that I have a harder time dealing with the human tragedy and aftermath than the actual patient care, or poor outcomes... When I was an intern, I had a gentleman that was 18, in a shootout and he got clipped in the head... Well, we rushed him to the trauma center where he was promptly pronounced dead. I happened to be charting outside the trauma bay when the nursing staff brought the family back, and what got me the most was this guy's wife and 1 or 2 year old child bawling over the body. I was sad, but also raging. I was so angry that this fucker made such a poor choice in life to get his ass shot and killed, leaving his child to grow up without a father. Who knows - maybe the kid won't grow up to be a banger - Unlikely. That's the stuff that really bothers me. That, or the 2 year old that I took to a hospice clinic to die, because his parents didn't want to feed him anymore on account of some congential defects. I understand the concept of hospice, and do-not-resuscitate, and fully support them. But to look upon a 2 year old child and know that this poor defenseless thing is going to starve to death, is just too hard.

Those are the demons I deal with. It's never hard to deal with the adrenaline, the blood, the "guts" - It's the human demons.