overly emotional after lecture from Coroner

[lilabean]

Today for our last day of lecture they had the county coroner come in to give a lecture about determining/pronouncing death and what criteria counts for making that determination. Well, what slide show would not be complete with out pictures, I mean pictures of various suicides, homicides (ie someone who jumped in front of a train, someone who put a shotgun in their mouth, you get the idea). But the hardest of all was the pictures of children abused to death and autopsy photos of their cause of death. This made me so emotional that I ended up leaving class early, I just couldn't take it and I was in tears and could not calm myself down, I was embarrassed to say the least. Now I am worried I don't have what it takes to do this. I used to volunteer in the ER and blood and gore never bothered me but this was just gruesome....

[mobey]

Lecture meaning you are still in school? (yes i know this is under students)

As most know, I am not great at consoling... or the emotional stuff, but I do wanna say this:

If your school put you through this damaging gore fest, they should be held accountable! Yes... at times we in EMS do get subjected to decapitation, deadly bleeds, abused children, SIDS, etc etc. We see these things in small doses, and sometimes need time off imediatly after to seek counsil to learn how to deal with the emotions attatched to these experiences.

There is no goddam reason to present a "slide show" of picture after picture, of dismembered or deceased patients in some mindless attempt to "teach" students.

Shame on your school, and shame on the coroner. What a frickin outrage!

You have all the grounds in the world to do whatever you like about this. but at the very least, you MUST get a petition going to end this behavior. I for one as a professional educator, and student of 2 colleges, and 2 universities with 4 years prehospital education, would LOVE to write a letter in support of any action you would like to take.

Someone else here will help you deal with the emotional trauma you have encurred, since i suck at that

Man this got me fired up for some reason......

Bullshit

Edited December 12, 2010 by mobey

[thrutheashes]

I agree with you mobey!

I wouldn't worry about the ability to handle the job, especially if you have dealt with similar type situations in an emergency setting. What this guy did just strikes me as plain nasty, and without reason. I've always been a believer of pushing people slightly past their comfort zone, but this is going through that and throwing them right off the proverbial cliff.

I would register a formal complaint with the school, at minimum.

Do you know if anyone else was affected by this quack's slide show? Like Mobey said...a petition going to get this crap stopped is not out of line.

Take Care

Thru

[Lone Star]

Lila,

When you decided to get into EMS, just what did you really expect the job to entail? Why did you decide to get into EMS in the first place? Did you walk in with blinders on, or did you really look into the field and see what our world REALLY looks like?

Forgive me if this seems too 'blunt'. This is not an attack on you in any form!

I highly doubt that your school, instructor or the coroner (or anyone else involved in this presentation) set out to intentionally scar you emotionally with this presentation.

Having been in the field for as long as I have, I can tell you that most of what we deal with in EMS is 'ugly'. When we're on scene, we don't have the luxury to call 'time out' and run out to the truck to regroup and get ourselves composed.

Could it be that the coroner's only intention was to help desensitize you in the classroom so that you dont 'fall to pieces' on the street?

There are going to be many times in your EMS career that people are going to depend on you to keep your shit together and be the 'rock' that they can cling to when their life is in total chaos. This isn't going to be possible if you're going to fall apart because the call involves kids, the elderly, the young, or whatever demographic tugs at your heart strings!

Yes, the pictures were probably very brutal, haunting and extremely disturbing. But remember, on scene you CAN'T go running from the house weeping your eyes out. You HAVE to grit your teeth, roll up your sleeves and get in the middle of the shit storm and do what you were educated to do!

We don't get to pick and choose what calls we are dispatched to. We don't get to only do the 'sunshine and belly rubs' calls that leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

You're going to go to calls where some abusive jackass man has beaten the ever-loving shit out of his wife/girlfriend/fiancée....you'll go to calls where some alcoholic mother has beaten her kids within an inch of their lives, or worse.

Depending on what type of environment you're in, you may even get the call for some innocent grandfather who just got 3 bullets in his chest from some strung out junkie who just shot him for a measly $12.00...

You'll be dispatched to the MVA in the middle of the night that was caused by a drunk driver, who just killed a family of four coming home from Grandma's house...and they only get a few cuts and bruises.

You might even get dispatched to the depressed person, who's decided that life isn’t worth living; and decides to deep throat a shotgun, and ends up splattering his brains all over the ceiling and walls.

Yes, EMS can be a very UGLY world, but it's what we do.

Again, this is not a personal attack Lila, it's the blunt, brutal reality of EMS...

[BAYAMedic]

I have taken the Basic course 2 times and am currently in Medic school, My experiances in classroom on the subject varied a bit with instructor. My first instructor for Basic didnt really touch on the subject (other than the soft tissue wounds slides). My second instructor, First night of class began with the youtube "indian man electrocuted on a train" watching someone grab a high voltage line and drop to the ground dead. There were lots of various exposures throughout the class to show EMS isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Impaled fencepost, Mortal heavy equiptment entanglements. ETC. I applied for a job shortly after my first EMT class, as a security guard at a hospital. Part of the interview was a stroll through the morgue and watching of an autopsy, and seeing a childs corpse in the fridge, to see if I could emotionally handle the day to day operations of the position. On the first day of paramedic school there was a bloody slide show, and Monster.com's commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8ZYsuwgehk. and He would finish his sentances several times through the day "and if this isn't for you the health sciences registration office is right down the hall , there are other programs with openings. One of the most impactful things was his reading of a poem to the class. I feel that the latter two instructors better prepared me for the harsh realitys of the dark side of EMS

Fireman1037

"I want to tell you lies."

Author unknown.

I want to tell that little boy his Mom will be just fine

I want to tell that dad we got his daughter out in time

I want to tell that wife her husband will be home tonight

I don't want to tell it like it is, I want to tell them lies

You didn't put their seat belts on, you feel you killed your kids

I want to say you didn't ... but in a way, you did

You pound your fists into my chest, you're hurting so inside

I want to say you'll be OK, I want to tell you lies

You left chemicals within his reach and now it's in his eyes

I want to say your son will see, not tell you he'll be blind

You ask me if he'll be OK, with pleading in your eyes

I want to say that yes he will, I want to tell you lies

I can see you're crying as your life goes up in smoke

If you'd maintained that smoke alarm, your children may have woke

Don't grab my arm and ask me if your family is alive

Don't make me tell you they're all dead, I want to tell you lies

I want to say she'll be OK, you didn't take her life

I hear you say you love her and you'd never hurt your wife

You thought you didn't drink too much, you thought that you could drive

I don't want to say how wrong you were, I want to tell you lies

You only left her for a moment, it happens all the time

How could she have fell from there? You thought she couldn't climb

I want to say her neck's not broke, that she will be just fine

I don't want to say she's paralyzed, I want to tell you lies

I want to tell this teen his buddies didn't die in vain

Because he thought that it'd be cool to try to beat that train

I don't want to tell him this will haunt him all his life

I want to say that he'll forget, I want to tell him lies

You left the cabinet open and your daughter found the gun

Now you want me to undo the damage that's been done

You tell me she's your only child, you say she's only five

I don't want to say she wont see six, I want to tell you lies

He fell into the pool when you just went to grab the phone

It was only for a second that you left him there alone

If you let the damn phone ring perhaps your boy would be alive

But I don't want to tell you that, I want to tell you lies

The fact that you were speeding caused that car to overturn

And we couldn't get them out of there before the whole thing burned

Did they suffer? Yes, they suffered, as they slowly burned alive

But I don't want to say those words, I want to tell you lies

But I have to tell it like it is, until my shift is through

And then the real lies begin, when I come home to you,

You ask me how my day was, and I say it was just fine

I hope you understand, sometimes, I have to tell you lies

[DwayneEMTP]

I'm kind of on the fence here..

I get what Lone Star is saying, that people should be exposed if they're going to want to be in a field that might leave them caring for these types of people, but also I have no trouble seeing an ass hat coroner bringing in his grossest material for the gag factor.

I don't think that you should be protected from such images when you choose to go into this field, but as Mobey and tta said, there is also no need to beat you over the head with it. In fact I always distrusted most the kids that would laugh and yell, "Look at the guts falling out!! That is so cool!" Much more than the students that I caught looking at their desks instead of the screen.

The question that I have for you girl is this, why did you look at the screen until you were so upset that you had to leave the class? Why didn't you choose to look away? During my studies I often chose to look away from the screen when the images made me feel, I don't know, unhealthy? At the end of the class I would hope that you would have been more able to care for your own well being. But I know that that is hard when you're new to something.

How many pictures were presented? How many of kids, and how many of those were 'brutal'? I'm curious if you were overwhelmed by a ton of photos, or by a few photos that simply kicked you in the ovaries? See what I mean?

I'm interested to see how this thread moves forward.

Dwayne

[HERBIE1]

Lilabean-

I'm sorry that this upset you, but I'm going to be a bit harsh. I see nothing inappropriate about that lecture- especially if it was the last one of the class. I also see nothing wrong with your reaction, but I'm thinking this is probably your first exposure to such nastiness. Better to flip out a bit now vs in a public place, in front of family and/or a patient.

I would not say your reaction means anything- yet. What do you want to do now? How do you want to proceed? How do you feel about the business now? Does this change anything for you?

I'm sure you realize that those horrific calls are few and far between, but they generally seem to come when you least expect them and/or when you at your most vulnerable personally.. Depending on where you work, you may see so much of this stuff you won't even bat an eye. Regardless of where you work, you will see various degrees of perversion and weirdness and hopefully you will find ways to adapt to it.

[AnthonyM83]

To those thinking a petition should be started instead of counselling the student, did you consider any other alternatives first?

Did the slides have any educational value?

Perhaps knowing how to recognise specific things or how not to mistake lividity for other conditions or partial decapitations or recognizing SIDS or any number of other issues which have been issues noticed by the coroner.

Or perhaps simply letting the school know it affected her instead of rushing off to start trouble. Maybe the school would actually care about students being affected. Gasp.

[mobey]

Sorry guys, I ain't buying it.

This is where I wish we had some psycological educated members on this forum. There is noo way, by any stretch of my imagination, that a slide show of this nature can do any good to a room full of EMT students. Please remember, this is technical school. These students are not in the mindframe of looking at patients as a "series of complicated systems" like some of us are. For the most part, they are still looking at them as "people", AKA, someones daughter, mother etc.

You want to be a pro-active school, have the students do a tour into the morgue to see lividity, rigor etc. But to show pictures of partial decapitation, dead babies, etc etc.... Gimme a fricken break.

Lets be realistic here.... I have had one experience with SIDS, it screwed up my mind and sleep for quite a while, my female partner had to take off 2 days, and seek coulsiling. Are you guys really advocating for a school that bombards brand new students with pic after pic of these mentally traumatizing images?

As prehopital professionals we can do better guys.

To those thinking a petition should be started instead of counselling the student, did you consider any other alternatives first?

I don't see anyone here who states a petition should be started INSTEAD of counselling.

Why other alternatives? I really do not see a petition as a "big" step... I suppose you could have a personal letter first, but to have it notarized by the profession demands a little more attention.

Did the slides have any educational value?

What does that have to do with anything?

HERBIE1

I also see nothing wrong with your reaction

Really?? So you fail to recognize mental trauma? Or are you saying you EXPECT that reaction... thereby saying you expect this type of slideshow to cause mental trauma?

[HERBIE1]

I am at a loss here. Why are people vilifying the coroner or the school here?

This class was designed for people who will be working in this field. They will see things like this and possibly much more.

If this coroner whipped out this slide show at a high school class or for some other non-medical audience, then I agree it would be inappropriate.

As a provider or a prospective employer, I would much rather know NOW if someone can handle the horrors we sometimes see on this job.

These things are part of the job. What is inappropriate about showing them?

Now I have no problem with the school or instructor pulling a student aside and having a heart to heart with them. Make sure they are OK, but also ask some tough questions. To me, this is like a firefighter who is afraid of going into a burning building. It's at the core of our job, and we need to not only deal with these things, but push our feelings aside to mitigate whatever situation we were called to handle. Not everyone can do this, and that's why those in this field are a special breed. Better to know now than after you've been hired and realize you made a huge mistake.