Quote:
Originally Posted by patriot41
I've always wonder how do you guys turn off your emotional switch when somebody dies?
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In what way?
Are you talking sexually as Piecenick talked about above? If so he is partially right but beyond that, for me it is not just when someone dies. It is any patient with very few exceptions. It is not something I have to turn off, it just happens. I think part of it is the environment and the circumstance and the fact that the scene is often to put it mildly very gross. There is just nothing sexy about it...
Or, are you talking more from a human stand point as in the emotional trauma of seeing/dealing with death on a regular basis? Some people are able to do this naturally, some people can do it for a while, and some people wash out quickly. I think if you stick with this line of work long enough, you loose a part of your soul. I am a professional and I am very good at taking care of what needs to be taken care of in the moment. You are just taking care of business and not thinking about the emotional side of it. Sometimes it hits you later though. Calls with dead or injured kids fuck with me the most. Some of them bother you for a few hours, some a few days, some a bit more. None of them ever leave you all together. There is a place in your mind where you lock all the bad shit away and sometimes it is a smell, or a sound, or a sight that brings it boiling up. For me it was my son being stabbed and me shooting the attacker then trying to keep my son from bleeding out. I kept completely cool and calm until the chopper took off with him for the regional trauma center. Then years of emotional trauma came boiling up and it took me months to straighten myself out. Even now I am a lot more emotional than I used to be. The first time I realized though that I was kind of fucked up in the head was a couple years ago when I was on the scene of a wreck where a drunk driver had taken out a few bikers head on. There were pieces of the bikers and the bikes spread over 450 feet and over 100 feet into the field next to the road. I was spent over two hours that night helping the state troopers find all the body pieces. I remember standing in the middle of the road surrounded by bone fragments, blood, guts, and body parts and feeling nothing and thinking it is not normal to see this and feel nothing. I then realized I had lost a part of myself and was kind of fucked up. What bothered me the most about that night was the fact it did not bother me. We used around 8,000 gallons of water that night to clean off that stretch of road. A lot of us end up with PTSD.