Giant Dwarf vs Misery
Written by Guest Blogger THE Deborah Tuckman, LCSW
Yeah, I can't write about any kind thing-purge right now. I've got tougher stuff on my mind. I often joke that I was probably a criminal in my previous life and now I am paying penance by being a social worker. I mean, really, what kind of person chooses this work? I admit that I left the theatre because I didn't feel like I was helping people or contributing to humanity (mostly because the theatre we were producing in the '90s was utter crap and the audiences were smugly validated by the playwrights and vice-versa). But my original intention when I went to graduate school in social work was to become a sex therapist.
WHAT HAPPENED?!?
Briefly, it turned out I hated doing therapy and was more suited to crisis-oriented work (theatre, go figure) so here I am with 13 years of Emergency Room social work under my belt. When I first started, and I was 13 years younger, we got a lot of knife and gun club members (that's ED-speak for assholes who prefer to settle arguments with weapons rather than words). With another trauma center that opened up closer to the thick of things and a general decline in crime in our fair city over the last decade, we haven't received as many of these hardcore homicides.
But today we did have a homicide. And a sexual assault. And a lonely old man who fell on a bus. Last week I dealt with two more sexual assaults, one on a child. I see domestic violence, substance abuse and addiction, and homelessness on a daily basis. I see families ignoring their elder relatives or outright abusing them. I see families who care "too much" and end up doing more harm than good. I work with schizophrenic and bi-polar people. Sometimes people thank me for my assistance, and sometimes a patient will curse me out with some pretty awful epithets.
And you know what? It's exhausting. Really exhausting. My husband spends 12 hours on his feet in another Emergency Department and he is tired too. But his tired and my tired are a bit different. I deal with peoples' misery, emotional crises, and unhappiness for my entire shift. It affects me in ways I've internalized so much that I don't even notice until something even shittier happens, like the murder of a young person.
This afternoon I ran into one of our staff who deals with employee crisis intervention. She thought that those of us in this profession should wear something akin to a "radiation badge" that xray technicians wear: the badge warns the wearer when the exposure is too high. She said that we all need to wear "exposure badges" that let us know when we're at our limit. But it won't work. We all work beyond our limit because we want to help and we have our own addiction to this crazy, chaotic place. When she surmised that at the point the badge tells us we're reaching our limit, the employee would be placed in another work area. And that's when I balked. Where else would I work? It's killing my spirit but it's feeding it too.
So it must be penance for a previous life's transgression(s).
Read more of Deb’s witty and honest insights at DebTheGiantDwarf