[batgirl]

WARNING: This thread has what I guess would be some pretty hard to deal with content, maybe a bit extreme. Read at your own risk.

I'm sure everyone already knows my foray into Paramedic school and all the trials and tribulations that are contained therein, so I won't bore you all with what's already been said. However, I've been having some problems lately with...well me, and since writing about myself has helped in the past (especially here where you guys can lend a pair of eyes to my situations), I'm back to writing again.

Lately I've been feeling very burnt out. I knew when I started this adventure that it would be a very long and very difficult road. There's a ton of material to know, tons of skills to master and very little time to do it in. I've been fairly successful thus far, mostly due to my experience and my ability to use critical thinking to form appropriate diagnoses and treatments for my patients. I've also been told that my bedside manner and patient interaction is by far the best in the class. However, I live, breathe, sleep, eat and am completely enveloped in Emergency Medical Services. I work full time as an EMT, go to school and do rotations; essentially being involved in EMS 7 days a week, and it's getting to me. I took it in stride at first, fully immersing and involving myself, but now it's getting exhausting. I wake up at ungodly hours and get no sleep to go to rotations (in fact I'm typing this at work after a full 8 hour rotation. I will be awake until 7am when I can finally go to sleep).

I'm almost at the end of my program and it's just becoming more and more exhausting. I'm under pressure to complete a certain amount of clinical requirements, so there's pressure there. On top of that, I'm just getting more and more tired. I'm tired of class, tired of being in a cramped ambulance and very tired of being just tired.

I was working in the emergency room last week when it really became apparent. I was running around as usual doing a million things for the various nurses and doctors in the ER, helping out where I could. We had a bunch of pediatric patients that day, and I was trying to assist as best as I could even though I'm not cleared to actually do anything invasive on kids yet. Basically taking blood pressure, temperatures and just generally helping out. Two wonderful and adorable baby girls came in for fevers that were extremely high, both had seized multiple times. I was charged with holding the poor kids down for the IVs and helping with getting urine through a catheter. The kids wailed and cried, the parents wailed and cried and I got peed on. The whole ER was full of these kids screaming the whole day. I know that I personally did nothing to hurt them, but a part of me felt responsible. The pediatrician decided to do a spinal tap on one of the kids with the higher fever to rule out meningitis. I was invited into the trauma room to watch the procedure, not knowing I'd be roped into helping. This baby, all of 15 months, needed three of us to hold her still enough to get tapped. Here is this beautiful baby girl, naked on an unforgiving trauma table, being bent into a football shape so that the curvature of her spine was good enough to get a giant needle stuck into it. I was holding her head as she cried and cried, even with sedation. It killed me.

I held her down as delicately as I could, knowing I was still hurting her, as I needed to be hard enough to keep her from thrashing. She wailed and dropped giant tears on my arm as I held the oxygen mask near her face and tried to keep an eye on her heart rate while the doctor did the procedure. She missed twice but finally got it. I then had to carry the baby, now not so naked, but bandaged and bloody to her parents. I felt just horrible.

I know it was an important procedure, but the whole thing put me so ill at ease. Sick kids are not easy to deal with, and it's something I've not had to deal with much (thankfully). Since then, I've had multiple sick children, each hurting me a bit inside. Yes, I'm helping them, but they're kids, they shouldn't be this sick. I took a boy with a rare blood disorder to the ER the other day because he was literally vomiting up the blood he just got transfused. It ripped at my heart to see him like that. I was shaking by the end of the call. I'm confident in my skills, but damn, what the hell...It's getting to me now, and I don't want it to.

My question to you all is: How do you cope when things seem uncopable?