A healthcare worker describes how professionals, especially firefighters and doctors, are expected to suppress emotions and keep working through trauma like machines. She shares a story about fearing for her firefighter husband during a fire, then argues we need to stop treating people as replaceable cogs and allow time to process and recover.
I'm gonna. I'm gonna just. Can I buddy up from. You use that term cog in a wheel? And it's very similar to. One of the terms I use is like, we're not robots, right? And so I think many times people who are in really busy fields, not just physicians or healthcare providers, but we just expect so much out of ourselves. And no matter what's going on at home, no matter what's going on in the office place, like, we are not robots. We have feelings. And when I hear. It's painful to hear some of the things that people choose to do. They just heard their. Their father died in between patients, and then they just go right into the next patient room, right? For myself, I remember, oh, it's been almost 20 years, and my husband's a firefighter, and I had called him, let him know there was a fire. He was his day off. He went in to go, go help. And then we heard that there were some fatalities. And I was at the office, and I didn't know if he was one of them. I know everybody at the fire department. It was a very small place. And, you know, the. The physician in me thinks, oh, I have to keep seeing my patients, that my day's not over yet. And it's like, how am I supposed to do that, right? I'm a human being, and I don't know if my husband's still alive or not. And. And he. He ended up being okay. Three of our friends that day, in hearing other people who turn on that robot mode and say, no, I'm just going to push through. How painful is that when we can't just say, you know what? I need a pause.
