When I got home tonight, my fiancee and I ordered in Chinese, opened a bottle of wine and chatted about our day. I told him about classes, he told me about work (my fiancee is a Internist at a hospital). He told me about a patient he lost last night at work and how disturbed he was about the case because he had really gotten to know this patient. And then it hit me: We are constantly surrounded by sickness and death. I am a Radiologic Technologist at Beth Israel Medical Center. I work in the Emergency Room, in the ICUs and in the O.R. In order to survive mentally, you MUST detach yourself from your patients. It is one of the first things they teach you going into the field.
A few months ago, my younger sister met me for dinner on my break. Outside of the emergency room, I was introducing my sister to a co-worker when an ambulance pulled up. The driver jumped out and tore the doors of the bus open and to my sister's horror, pulled out the stretcher. There was an infant straddled by a medic performing CPR being rushed into the ER. To me, this was nothing special, just a patient, a chest x-ray to be done... work. My sister was horrified that I simply turned around, looked at the medics and continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. She couldn't understand how I seemed so emotionless. The coping mechanism for military personnel and medical personnel are quite similar. The dead, dying and sick must become work and nothing more.
The problem is, you can never really detach completely, at least I can't anyway. What happens is that when you least expect it, you remember things; memories that creep up on you over your General Tao and pinot, like the look in a family members eyes when they've just lost their mother, or the Winnie the Pooh print on the baby's diaper and the sound of the mother sobbing from inside the ambulance.
