Apples to Oranges

If you’ve ever been to a Crossfit box you’ll know they can be family friendly and some even have child care services. I go to a pretty run of the mill box. I keep to myself, do the WODs (workout of the day) and get on out. Weekends are kid heavy. I am in an affluent white area. The exact opposite of the communities I serve. Most days the contrast of my home life doesn’t bother me. I live on a farm. I spend my time off in the woods, alone or with friends, being at peace in nature. Recharging for the never ending chaos of my job. 

It’s sunday morning. I worked yesterday. It was busy. I am down on charts but I am here to do something for me. 

Today, however, although waking up in a great mood, I start to get irritated in the warm up. I notice I am deeply and irrationally bothered by the kids and their parents. This turns to anger. I am doing my warm up just livid at these kids nearby who have zero interaction with my personal space. I then realize I am mad at the parents. I inhale deeply and take a mental step back. 

I almost snowed an 8yoM yesterday. 

“Snowed” (verb): EMS and ED slang term to describe heavily sedating a patient who is combative. Snowing drugs are usually benzos or ketamine. Ex: “Bill snowed that guy on PCP after he broke restraints and tried to jump out of the ambulance on 95”. 

I was desperately trying to get caught up on charts when I hear the BLS crew call for a medic. They were on a psych. 

This was a very good crew. If they were asking for me, something was deeply wrong. They likely had a combative patient and needed sedation. I scrambled off EMS charts, got to my car and  blasted off to the scene. 

I arrive and one of EMTs met me outside. He grabs one of my bags.

“Sorry we wouldn’t call you unless we needed you-“

I cut him off: “Don’t apologize. I know you wouldn’t call me unless you needed me.”

EMT nods. 

“8yoM. He is combative and agitated. Threatening to hurt himself- we can’t get him to calm down. He has been sedated before.”

Me: “You think he needs to be sedated?”

EMT: “yeah I think so”

Me: “okay I got the narcs. Let’s go”

This apartment was wild. 

The patient had been contained to a closet where he was actively screaming and kicking the door off the hinges. 

His mother states “This is where I put him to calm down!”

There are two cops and a crisis social worker on scene. 

Ive called for mobile crisis in the past and never had anyone available or they say the scene isn’t safe so they refuse to come. I stopped calling them since it was always a waste of time. I was actually excited to see what they did. 

Spoiler alert: Apparently they just take notes. What do they do with those notes? Maybe Ill remember to ask someone one day. 

One of the EMTs pulls me into another room to talk with the mother. Two other young boys are tearing the apartment to shreds screaming at the top of their lungs. 

His mother is afraid of him. She is equally scared and exhausted. She says he tried to jump out the window 2x. He is violent. He kicks and fights and tries to hurt himself. 

This kid didn’t end up needing to be sedated, thanks to the phenomenal EMT’s kid skills, but I rode it in because that’s what we should do. I talked to the kid in transport. He’s just an average eight year-old boy who wants to kick and scream and do what boys do. He had mental health struggles and that is 100% OK 100% treatable. Before we left for transport, his mother showed me one of his drawings. This kid was drawing beyond his age. I smiled and thought to myself “a fellow creative”.

In transport, the kid told me he didn’t know what happened, but he remembers being very mad and thrashing about. He told me how his dad won’t let him play soccer and how he wants to play football. I asked him what position he wanted to play and he didn’t know. I asked him if he wanted to be on defense or offense he said offense. I asked him if he wanted to throw the ball or catch the ball and he said catch and I said so you wanna score the touchdowns and he said yes I want to score the touchdowns and smiled. 

We transferred him to the PED facility and he was so cute with the nurses zipping around on his wheelie shoes showing us tricks. He was polite. He was kind. He is an eight-year-old boy.

Around the 2 year mark, I noticed I sometimes reacted differently to thoughts or normal activities. Nothing was interfering with my functioning but I was occasionally just “off” with things in my day-to-day life.

It started as I would get emotional or start tearing up at stuff that was not important. It wasn’t necessarily bad stuff either. Just random shit like a mother horse nickering at it’s newborn on youtube. Sometimes things were going really well and I would cry because it was going so well. I’ve never done that before in my 3+ decades on the planet. I did not recognize this new behavior.

The less common thing which came to my attention was that I occasionally felt wronged by people who didn’t deserve it. People who were unrelated to anything that had to do with my line of work or where I had been or who I had treated. People who had no idea I even existed or what the hell was going on inside my brain.

I was mad at them.

Spreading the chaos and trauma to people who didn’t deserve it in the least. 

I didn’t deserve it either. And neither did my patients or partners or supervisors or bystanders.

 So here I am at CrossFit. Furious that these parents have no clue how good they have it. That they bitch and moan and complain about stupid shit like the Eagles and the Super Bowl and schedules and taking their kids to sports games.

I’m so mad at these parents. They have no lack of resources. Their kids play sports and go on vacations. They have their own rooms and TVs and computers. 

I’m probably also embarrassed of my own upbringing. Mad at myself. Born into a home with beyond ample resources. Fully paid private school and a college degree were written in my future before I was even conceived. I was given a car when I turned 16. We vacationed in europe in the summer and the virgin islands in the winter. I lived in Italy 2x working on my masters. My parents have been married for over 40 years. I was born lucky. I never longed to want.

The contrast makes me nauseous. I feel guilty and ashamed. Am I allowed to feel?

My patient is a human. He is a little boy who deserves to be running around a CrossFit gym just like all these other kids. 

But it’s not their fault and it’s not this little boy‘s fault. And it’s not all the kids faults and it’s not Crossfit‘s fault and it’s not my fault either. And then I started to tear up. Moments like these are empty as a void yet heavy at the same time. Where you feel so helpless, even though you did all the right things. 

You treated a little boy with kindness and avoided sedation. This is a huge win. No one wants to be sedated. No one wants to snow a child. No one wants to be apart of that last resort effort which can be so violating even though necessary. The little boy doesn’t want to be pinned down and darted with Versed. No family wants to see that. No provider wants to do that. It does not get easier. Sometimes you have to recognize the situation is just fucked. 

We run 5000 calls a month, we can’t do it all. We are working with limited resources on empty. We have our own personal lives with personal problems we cannot bring to work. We cannot bring work home either. We are under paid. We are sent back into the street even after serious trauma and injury because there is no one else available. Most days, we go to work sick, tired and hungry in a monster energy and nicotine haze. All roads led us here, to this career, to this place, to these patients. We stay because in our heart of hearts, we want to be a part of the good side of humanity. 

“Original Sin” by Sofi Tukker