Clean underwear

myths, truths, and sparkles from The Pitt

I love a good legend, and the most notable one I can think of related to EMS is the one offering a rationale for clean underwear. Is this a the influence of television, or did your mother (or grandmother, or other wisened human) love-threaten you to wear clean underwear in case you were ever attended to in an emergency and the medics would *gasp* see your Nethers, judge you, and then admonish you for your laundry frequency?

This week I spent a 12 hour shift in the emergency department as one of the required activities for the conclusion of my EMT training, which was a terrific privilege and wildly revealing of my own biases, tendencies, and neuroses. While I did support the dressing and undressing and peripheral needs of dozens of humans, involving quite a bit of underwear, no one evaluated or told stories about evaluating the status of undergarments.

(I will say that if you want actually useful advice, consider wearing garments which have snaps at every seam. Uncomfortable, yes. Practical, no. Problematic at airport security, probably. But also the only thing that EMS would actually notice because of how helpful it would be).

Since the rest of what happened is None Of Your Damned Business, but I still have things I want to share with you, this latte will be terrifically myopic and self-centered. No patient information, no gore, and really very little that occurred outside of the winding narrow single-track thought-trains of my own mind.

Biases
I expected to be relatively more smarter than I was. While I like to be in rooms with folks smarter than I am, I also like to think of myself as one of the smartest folks in the room. Hard to squeeze both of those in due to the constraints of physics, what with time and location being what they are.

The medics I shadowed and observed were wicked smart, noticing nuances in the environment and taking calculated steps while I mostly got in the way while trying to casually not look like I was getting in the way. Gurneys move fast on the way to and fro, and they have the right-of-way, no matter how confident you try to look.

These EMT people should be paid heaps more than they are. While I was able to buy one a coffee, what I wanted to do was draft each of them a retrospective love letter highlighting just how unreasonably special and skilled they are while also buying them each a house and ensuring that they never ever have to do other jobs or second jobs.

I get attached to any sort of certainty I’m offered, so I was mildly unhinged when my first proctor was replaced by another because shifts ebb and flow and overlap, and so Proctor One sailed off into another quadrant without much other than a quick “nice to meet you!” back over their shoulder.

(Proctor Two was equally lovely in their own way, but I had not baby birded onto them, so you can appreciate that no one will ever be quite as radiant as Proctor One. Proctorly speaking).

Tendencies
Overplanning is a cute thing I do when I’m not sure how something will play out. How do I control it? On the scale of needless GRE type story problems. Wind speed, the angle of the rising sun at this latitude in the third week of spring, traffic at 6am, about whether I should have coffee so early that I per before I leave the house, or before I tell the charge nurse I’ve arrived, or maybe wait until I know what the bathroom and workload situations will be?

I’ve learned that others don’t do this. How did I learn this? By oversharing my neurosis at the nurses station. Others? They just… take things as they come… drinking when they are thirsty, caffeinating as needed, peeing when the circumstances present themselves.

Overthinking - because I’m not often a “short version” person AND I was arriving to shadow someone in their regular work without their knowing or consent AND because this has not always felt swell in the past, I spent many early mornings considering how I might succinctly (and pleasantly!) describe who I am and why I am doing an EMT training.

I was so afraid I would be weird. Both actively and in their perceptions.

Instead, they were deeply compassionate and interested. Unaffected by some “I’m on the path to med school in my late forties,” and gently willing to explore my childlessness without prying or judging. Skillful space holders who offered in seven seconds what one can only hope to get in seven sessions of therapy.

Neuroses
I was afeared that I would perish from malnutrition over the course of a 12 hour shift. My selfish, selfish biggest worry heading into the shift was whether or not I would have the opportunity to eat. I squirreled bite sized snack bars into all of my zippered paramedic pants pockets. And with the pocket space devoted to sustenance rather than cell phones, I wore my jogging bra which has a phone holster between the shoulder blades, which was profoundly odd in a way these kind souls said was ‘charming’.

I was unquestionably weird.

But they didn’t make me feel like I was, which is the peculiar magic of the emergency department. Arriving in the precise moment when someone’s life is shambly at best. When they must somehow remember what they ate, and why they are on medication, and if their black eye was there before today or if it’s new.

The Pitt got this bit quite right, as well as the jovial staffly interplay and the lurk of burnout. The pace and mystery of who will come in next. I was too timid and too slow, and in the way far too often in my massive clunky steel-toed boots. But as I wrapped for the day I thanked the nurses in my area each by name, and made my way to the car, certain I would perish in the rays of the setting sun, who I would again be chasing on my commute. Damn it, physics!

Proctor One reappeared as we made our way from the inner sanctum to the periphery of the department, and picked up the conversation we had interrupted seven hours before.

“…You know what they call people who overthink absolutely everything?” They asked, all glinty in the eye… like someone who has spent many hours considering their retort.

I felt my face flush and looked up at the half globed mirror in the pedestrian junction above us, finally alert for gurneys that move fast and with priority.

“They call them doctors….”

Thanks for reading,

K