Originally Posted by
Frank_B
I’m sure you’re aware of this, but you’re seeing the rare cases, the abnormal cases, the sad cases, precisely because you work in a hospital.
Years ago I was deployed to Iraq with some several hundred thousand other military folks. I was not on the front lines. I never even left the base. That said, It was in a bad place. They mortared us quite often. But, each night I slept easily because they were bad shots and the base was huge. I figured that if one landed in my bed I wouldn’t know it and the odds were so abysmal then I was just due for expiration.
Day and night, medical helicopters were flying into the base. We had one of the only Class (3?) trauma units in theatre. One day I woke up and for no reason whatsoever my elbow was the size of a tennis ball, and real red and warm. The flight doc took me to the ER there as they had X-rays and other equipment he didn’t readily have.
As we walked the halls of this place, my perspective changed. I got to see some of the people whose luck didn’t turn out so well. It frightened me, but then I also realized that housed here was every unfortunate bastard from all the bases in Iraq in one place. Somewhere deep down I still understood that these were the 1% and that the odds were still overwhelmingly in my favor.
It doesn’t lessen my empathy for those guys, but it allowed me to carry forward and recognize that there was no reason to panic. I’m sure if you asked the doctors, the wounded, and the killed, they’d have told you the war was atrocious. For the rest of us, we had to go about our lives without panic and fear lest we make things 1000 times worse.