Lesson 2: The Masks we Wear Suffocate Us (Part A)

I know I promised you Lesson #2 in the title but I also promised you some bloody stories from Lesson #1 on the value of life… Don’t worry it ties in.

Remember that I said I was going to school for emergency medical training (after the real estate market crashed on me and I lost my truck and house, yikes). During one of my first clinical rounds in the ER, I was observing someone get stitches from a traumatic injury and as I was looking over the physician assistant’s shoulder I started to get light headed and felt like I was going to puke or pass out (both would be an embarrassing situation to explain to the patient, my teacher, and my fellow students). I ran out of the room, locked myself in the bathroom and took a shower in the sink…  

The room was spinning and I was seeing floating lights in the limited tunnel vision that I had. I think someone was banging on the door trying like it was an emergency to get in the bathroom. Heck, we are in the ER so maybe it way. I let them in as I escaped around them. I needed some fresh air to contemplate quitting or trying to figure out how can I be in the field without seeing blood. Is it possible? Probably not I assumed. By the way, dear reader, I have never told anyone about this so let's just keep it between you and I, OK?

Growing up in the church, being a middle child, and having the curse of being talented in the art of getting along in any group or situation, I became an expert in fake it till you make it. So, I put on a smile, went back into the ER and delivered blankets and warm conversations (avoiding anything too messy at all costs) till the end of this clinical. 

What was I to do? Well, I had to get used to seeing blood, guts, death, and lots of poop. Yep, firefighter / paramedics deal with a ton of poop in their jobs. So without being labeled as a psychopath, how do you get training on being desensitized to the sights and smells of emergencies? Was there a book I can read to prepare me for this? Well, back to the movies and tv shows I went.

I started watching shows about surgeries, more movies with blood and guts, documentaries, and online videos showing people getting hurt. It made me cringe watching people get hurt or cut open. I had sympathy for the people under the knife or who were being injured…. Except on JackAss and Y2K, that was pretty funny. 

While I was watching these shows and footage, I was getting use to seeing people in pain and I was observing how the doctors, medics, and medical staff acted in response to the situation. Here is a sideline observation, it is very difficult to maintain a sensitive heart when you are constantly helping people in pain. You become hard, tactical, and surgical in your response to people. That is hard on relationships, so if you know any people in the medical field, first responders, or people who deal with people all day (like cashiers and the return department at Walmart) have a little grace for them because it is hard dealing with problems all day long. Which reminds me that I always need to go back and remember Lesson #1… life is valuable.

Ok so quickly, here are some bloody stories and how I faked it until I made it. (This mask would suffocate me later on in life).

So after watching the actors and professionals in the movies, shows and documentaries, I saw that there were a few different personality types in every emergency group of people. Here they are… 

The Brainiac - Like the show “House”, there is always a super smart spoc in the group who reads the text book and gets it, scientifically. They really don’t understand people, emotions, or feelings but they can remember every medication and symptom in the book. They are typically short tempered, use big words, grabs things from others, and is famous for saying things like, “get out of my way” “I told you so” or “go get me a coffee and make yourself useful”.

The Brut - This person is the good looking person who is great at lifting heavy things, following orders to the tee, and getting people to do exactly what they order (maybe for fear of their lives). 

The Pleaser - This person is really good with people, typically a jokester, and apologizes a lot for the brut and brainiac.

Well, I was born a Wilson so I wasn’t going to be a massive Brut and I couldn’t remember all the formulations of the becks triad and what kind of drug I wasn’t able to give if someone was in a helicopter flying over the pacific….. so that left me with The Pleaser character.

The Pleaser’s usually were whistling, joking, or having fun. That made a lot of sense to me, it could distract both the patient and myself from what was going on. 

The movie, Patch became my favorite of the lot. Still makes me tear up. I’d laugh and joke with the patients and bring smiles and a little joy to those who were hurting. It kept my mind off their arm that was bloody and falling off (well maybe I wouldn’t joke with that guy) but I was able to bring calm to chaos. 

Here is a trick I learned from a nurse, keep peppermint candies on hand at all times. Good for kids and helped cover the smells of poop, vomit, and burning skin. Pop a mint in your mouth and you can avoid just about any smell. I would also whistle or sing songs whiles moving patients around. The patients and coworkers thought I was super confident, I was just trying to not pass out or throw up. 

During one clinical in school, I was in an ambulance and we were called out for a heart attack. As we were in route, we got upgraded (not like on Delta, but in our response urgency) to now a code with cpr in progress. Yikes again! I am in the back of the ambulance flipping through my textbook as we are running hot with lights and sires going to this call. It was a blur, but we ran in… I was supposed to coordinate the scene, so I started telling the crew what to do, we continued cpr, attached them to machines and tubes, got information from the family, and before I could blink my eyes we were running hot to the ER trying to save this person’s life. We gave them drugs, electricity, a tube down their throat to breath for them, huge needles in their arms, and high flow diesel (that’s what we called it when we drove the boxes fast to the hospital). 

We exchanged the patient to the ER crew and assisted until the Crash team arrived and booted us out. Don’t know if they lived or not. That was a real shitty part of the job, we rescued people and had no clue the outcome of the people because of Hippa privacy laws. I always wanted to know who lived and who didn’t… I can only hope I made a difference. This was the thankless part of the job.

Well, after that medical call my adrenaline was pumping and I was bombarded with excitement of the events and the praise I received from my clinical instructors. We had to stop by my instructors house to pick up some clean shirts after being covered in the fluids of the patient during our last call. Remember when I said we dealt with a lot of poop? Did you know that when you die or begin to die, your muscles relax…. well your butthole is a muscle and sometimes people crap themselves when they die. Not a glorious moment for all those involved. Well when my instructor was changing in the next room, I hit their liquor cabinet and had a big pull from a bottle of tequila. This is another thing I would prefer staying between you and I.

I got pretty good at this emergency medical thing and went on to become a full fledged career firefighter paramedic and I became a full time literal mask wearing pleaser. 

Lesson 2: Part A - The masks we create to save us, eventually suffocate us. (I’ll explain in part b) 

Links to other Lessons

Introduction - Josh The Failure: an accidental book on purpose https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/josh-failure-accidental-book-purpose-rough-draft-joshua-wilson/

Lesson 1 - The Sight of Blood and The Value of Life - https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/lesson-1-sight-blood-value-life-continued-joshua-wilson/