|
Irisa, thank you very much for sharing your journey. We have had similar experiences. I worked in the medical field for 21-years and then switched over to the mental health field, worked another 21-years as a therapist, social worker, and later a college instructor. I had a very challenging, and wonderful career.
Started back in 1964 when I joined the U.S. Army at the age of seventeen, my mother signed for me to join the army, and they made a combat medic out of me. The army sent me to Vietnam 2-years later at the age of nineteen, and at 19-years old I was sewing people up, delivering babies, and holding people in my arms as they took their last breath. After the army I became an ambulance EMT and then later worked in a hospital and then a hospice.
It was very confronting and stressful work but it helped me look deeper into myself. I worked on the burn unit at University Hospital in Denver, Colorado. A family’s home heating system exploded, mom, dad, and two kids were all in separate room on the burn unit. Third degree burns over most of their body. They look like raw hamburger meat. The mother, who was barely conscious, asked me to read her Bible to her. I am not a Christian, but the Bible was next to her on a stand so I picked it up, opened it, and began to read to her. She died as I was reading. I have lots of stories like that..
I have seen hundreds of people die, in all sorts of situations, homicide, suicide, terminal illness, sudden death, etc. I remember working on a hospital ward, I was very young, and one of my patients was terminally ill. A “no-core,” which means if he goes into cardiac arrest do not do CPR, just let him die peacefully. I have also been in triage situations as and ambulance paramedic on the street where I had to decide who I could help and who I should just let die. A triage trauma situation can be deeply challenging. You can not help everyone, that’s the way it was in Vietnam, so you help who you can and you let the others die. All of these experiences have been my teachers, and they helped me get in touch with my own mortality..
|