Facing Fears

Day One of Trauma surgery. When I started med school - heck, when I was pre-med - I knew that the one thing I couldn't do was trauma. Surgery was a bit iffy at first, even. But during an internship in college, I came to grips with how everything in surgery was very contained and depersonalized. It was not a person we were cutting into, it was a yellowish blob that contained pretty neat things. Still, trauma lurked as this very scary, very uncontrolled...thing. A thing that I wanted to stay away from.

But here I am. On the trauma service. Partially because I had almost last pick out of my group. But partially because I know that I can't let there be something this major that scares me in medicine. If I'm going to be a good doctor, I need to be prepared to face things that I don't want to. Just look at what we ask patients to do: Sit still while we jam a needle in your arm; a tube in your chest; you have cancer, and we need to kill your body to kill the tumor, so deal; your father/mother/sister/brother is not going to survive this, do you want to withdraw care? How could we expect anything less from ourselves, than the willingness to boldly face the things we don't want to.

So, by chance or by choice, I found myself in my first trauma code this morning. A woman shot herself in the temple. In a park. A passer-by found her. She. Was. Not. Pretty. I won't go into details here...but this was not a depersonalized surgery patient. This was a person with a face and hands. Just not life.

Suicide patients are tough. What do you do with them? They are obviously trying to end things...why should we have the right to go against their wishes? Then again, less than 10% of people who try once go on to try again (I think...I need to verify that) - perhaps given the drive to go on living after their life was saved. Obviously, we must try to save everyone we can.

It's late, and I'm tired. And I committed a major faux pas today: I let my resident hear me complain. Grr. I NEVER complain. I try so hard - I barely even complain to my friends about being tired or feeling over-worked. I wasn't even really complaining today, I was just making a comment about the call schedule to my fellow student on the service, and she was listening, and jumped in to chide me. Arg. What a great first impression to make...