How good are you in not letting stress over one problem affect another?

Pretty poor.

Pretty good. I compartmentalized my professional life quite well from my personal life. I don’t think my wife wanted to sit at dinner with me and hear all the gory details of the ER on a Saturday night after bar closing, or of the disasters I worked, even though she was an RN as well. She worked in a nice, clean OR as a nurse anesthestist specializing on infants. They crash fast. She had enough drama in her life without me adding to it.

Anyway, all things being equal, ethically, I still would never want to compare saving drunk, doped up assholes with that of saving babies who, due to no fault of their own, could flat line on you without warning. I would never want to get into that kind of pissing contest with her. She was the real hero in my book.

I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing various areas of my life. Mostly, it works for me. Even when I’ve been going through some rather harrowing experiences, the ability to ‘shove my emotions in a box and push it under the bed’ has helped me get some distance from the raw emotion and given me time to calm down so I can make rational decisions or reflect on what’s happened.

However, there have been occasions when everything is boiling over in each area of my life and then it’s really impossible to keep everything separate and in control. It hasn’t happened often, but I have on occasions found myself in tears and wondering how I was going to make it through whatever I was going through.

Even if you do compartmentalize, I think it’s important to realize at some point you’re going to have to come back and deal with whatever was causing you stress. In my experience, those boxes have a habit of flying out from under the bed, the lid flies off and I’m suddenly forced to grapple with whatever I had been avoiding dealing with. My hope is that when the boxes fly out I’m in a position to rationally deal with whatever was in them. I have to say that at times the emotions are still as painful, even if years have passed. We can’t hide forever.

I was hot into my profession. If Hitler walked through the door, he would get the same level of care as everyone else, to the very best of my abilities. It never entered my mind to treat anything but the wounds and diseases. Medicine won’t work any other way. So, I did some compartmentalizing in that area.

I had one guy who I’ll never forget. A Turk, a geriatric case who had such poor lower extremity blood circulation that he had open, running wounds on his feet and legs. He was in his early 90’s and writing his memoirs. This was about 1995. As a young man, he was a soldier in the Turkish army involved in the extermination of Armenians in an attempt to cleanse his land of them. While I did his dressing changes, he would unapologetically talk about going into an Armenian village, shoot every male over puberty, then herd all the women and children into the village church and light them up. He and his buddies would stand around the church, eating their lunch, and shooting anybody that ran out. He called it target practice.

His debridement and bandaging was the best. I never skimped on the painkillers. He got the best care I could offer. This is the way it must be. If these people run free among us, it is our system of justice that has failed. It cannot be up to medicine to mete out justice. That in itself is unethical and criminal.