An old friend of mine who still works the road full time confided in me that he was again having a crisis of faith. We have often talked about burnout, each of us having periods when we found it a struggle to uphold the highest standards of patient care. Not the medicine part, which is largely mechanical, but the patient empathy part, which is emotional.
“People don’t understand,” he tells me. “Everytime the public sees an ambulance racing past, they think someone’s dying, life-savers to the rescue! I want to say to them when the ambulance gets where they dispatched, instead of a person needing CPR or a rapid shot of epinephrine to save them from anaphylactic death, it is instead a thirty-year old with a belly ache on the fourth floor who has been tp the hospital three times this week for the same thing and who refuses to get up off the couch and demands you carry their two hundred and seventy pounds down dilapidated curving stairs, all the while they moan and shake and mutter ‘Help me, help me’ like we aren’t breaking our backs already.
“I feel like a burnout. I feel like the worst of our kind and I just want to say. ‘You can walk, there is nothing wrong with your legs. Get the F-up!’ I don’t say it of course, but I want to. I mean, I really want to say it.
“I carry them out to the stretcher in the rain, and get them loaded in the back, and take my second set of vitals, which are completely normal, then I sit there and write my run form as we bounce over the city streets, my back killing me with every pothole. At the hospital, I wait with them in triage for twenty minutes, listening to their moaning, and then I put them in a wheelchair, which they resist until the triage nurse yells at them, then I leave them in a designated spot in one of the hallways. They won’t sign the run form, so I get a nurse to sign acknowledging that I brought the patient to the hospital so we can bill the state or their insurance, then I go out and do it again. Of course not every call is that way. There are still people who are legitimately sick who we help, but for all the good I feel I do, I can’t shake that voice from inside me, the bad man who wants to say. ‘Get the F-up!‘
“Maybe I have overstayed my time. I still love the job, but some days, I just don’t want to be here anymore, not that I would have anywhere else to go, after all this time, after all these years.
“I’m not cut out to be a greeter at WalMart. I’m just a paramedic who’s seen his better days. I still have bills to pay and years to go before I can retire. And years to go.“
It makes me sad when I see him this way.