We’re in the habit as front line staff to normalise the horrific sites we see. We arrive on scene, do what we can, pack our stuff up and leave. It may sound crass but we keep our spirits up with jokes and laughs. Incongruent from the scenes just metres away.
I realised this today after a very nasty RTC where the pt died on impact. Despite ALS, fluids and HOTT principles we couldn’t get them back. They were young too. So we stopped, packed up our things and left them there, on the road, waiting for the crime scene investigators to do their work.
Those of us who had been in the frontline services for years found it easy to just crack on with the rest of the shift, next patient, next job.
Later on in the shift I had a chat with one of our new non-clinical staff members; he said it had been the first job like this he had been to, and that the sight of the patient’s glove lying in the middle of the road really struck home the tragedy. I said it’s ok to feel like this, certain jobs and cases still affect those who have been doing it a while.
There’s a fine line between being resilient and having a black hole for a heart.
Someone You Thought You Knew 