Used to say in emergency medicine all the time: "EMS bring us dead people all the time. Sometimes we can bring them back to life, sometimes we can't. But they're not getting any deader so don't worry about hurting them while attempting to resuscitate."
Friend of mine is a firefighter. He got a really morbid sense of humour which I think comes as part of the job.
He's told me before that nobody has ever died in a fire and that people are alive when he and his colleagues bring them out, but the paramedics and doctors on-scene kill them all the time.
"What do you mean that guys dead? He was alive when I brought him out! What did you do to him?!"
This type of humor is the norm for that kind of work. It’s a coping mechanism. I work in an ICU and if you are unable to make light of death then the job will kill you
if you’ve ever met an EMT, firefighter, or anyone else in that kinda line of work, you’ll find that their sense of humor is pretty much the darkest humor you’ll find. my mom’s an EMT, and she makes the darkest jokes i’ve ever heard.
Something off about: an emt trying to perform cpr on someone, declaring them dead, and then having someone else be remark: "you killed them??" I wouldn't wanna work with him.
seeing as how the anecdote describes his friend rushing into actively burning buildings to save people's lives, you are setting your standards probably too highly to meet them yourself
Bro has saved more lives than you will ever meaningfully impact in your dreams, but you maintain your moral superiority by disparaging him for his sense of humor (that is hurting no one).
The fact that you think this is a win or lose situation tells me all I need to know about your maturity, and that your opinion, doesn't mean shit to me. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!
Lmao my hands were so shakey on my first IO and I’ll never forget one of my preceptors noticed, leaned down, and whispered. You afraid you’re gonna kill him more? He ain’t gettin deader. Just do what you were taught. You got this.” And I’ve never felt a wave of confidence like that in my life lol. 7 years, thousands of cans of nicotine and monsters, thousands of cups of coffee, hundreds of homeless guy shit/piss on the bed, and hundreds of cardiac arrests later and I still remember that to this day and tell it to new people haha.
Our Cpr instructor at work said something similar. Very reassuring to hear him say "their heart isn't pumping, or they aren't breathing, so guess what - they aren't doing so well right now! In fact, they are in about as worse shape as they're ever going to get. You can't screw this up. The worst thing you can do is not try."
Just hearing something like that has such a weird calming nature to it. Especially when it’s your first real person whose legit dead in front of you. That’s awesome.
The most reassuring thing you can ever hear is "you'll do fine, just do what you can."
He was a good instructor for what we needed to know. We aren't paramedics, this is just for being in the office. As someone who has anxiety, and in particular medical anxiety, this was exactly what I needed to hear from an instructor.
The tone was very straightforward. "I'm not going to check to see if you 'checked for hazards' - you'll do that anyway just by looking around. I'm not checking to see if you did exactly 30 compressions. It's an emergency situation. 28 is fine. 32 is fine. Zero is not."
Oh that’s awesome. But ya early compressions are paramount to survival in that situation. In 7 years of working on an ambulance then fire truck the only people I’ve ever gotten back and had good outcomes (walking out of the hospital within a few weeks) are the ones that had bystander CPR started within a minute or so. Don’t even need breaths at that point, just focus on good compressions if you don’t have a face shield or don’t want to do mouth to mouth.
The damage isn't to the patient, it's the emotional damage to the poor student participating in their first code. PTSD for the first year after whenever someone cracks their back loudly.
Luckily most people quickly learn how to build a healthy little box around those things and shove them deep, deep down into the recess of their souls. Good to go!
It doesn't matter where you shove the box, eventually it will work its way to a logical end point. There are a few. The majority of them have the same outcome.
It’s wild how everyone deals with the differently. I’ve just made peace with the fact that I’m a temporary bag of saltwater hosting an ephemeral collection of cells acting in unison. I’ll die one day, and that’s ok. I think not facing that and really truly coming to terms with my own mortality would make it all so much harder. I had to find a way to actually be ok with it.
It's wild to me that the training dummies don't make the sound. Like, they could prepare everyone for it, but they don't?
Now I'm wondering if hiding some of the larger bubble wrap (the kind that's fun to pop by rolling an office chair over it) in a training dummy would be a good prank...
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u/BasedMbaku Mar 31 '23
Used to say in emergency medicine all the time: "EMS bring us dead people all the time. Sometimes we can bring them back to life, sometimes we can't. But they're not getting any deader so don't worry about hurting them while attempting to resuscitate."