The Emotional Washing Machine

and other things that make as much sense

If you’re here for tips about how to oxycleanse the lived experience of your soul, please allow me to disappoint you right here in the opening sentence. This post is entirely emotional, and not in any way practical.

(ok, for paid subscribers, I’ll share a few laundry tips below the paywall).

For those of you following along with my absurd mid-life revolution aka the path to medical school, you’ll love to know that I’m now approximately 12 weeks into my 14 week EMT training course (although somehow we still have three weeks to go). So far we have learned a good number of things, read the majority of a ten pound book, and watched a potpourri of foraged YouTube lectures to support our learning. Some are intended for med students, others for nurses, and some have a less-than-subtle sales pitch aimed at the vulnerable base of the medical pyramid, which is where we find ourselves.

There are many things we haven’t learned explicitly that feel relatively essential to the duties of an EMT, whose mantra is assess, stabilize, and transport. We have done some good assessing of one another and the large and unreasonably life-like human-shaped silicone entities, some of whom are equipped with breath sounds (and pubic hair?)* but we have yet to do much with the stabilize and transport portions.

Maybe that’s the bit we’re all supposed to know, but it’s the part I feel most uncertain about.

Yes, I’ve done doula gymnastics around gurneys and bathtubs, but I never went to prom and my version of dancing with trauma is insufficiently logistical for it to be of much use.

For this reason, I’ve worn comfortable shoes to each class, anticipating that it might be the one where I would be called upon to load one of my firefighting classmates or a gently stabilized silicone blobber onto a stretcher or a ‘stair chair’ and into journey mode.

Instead, this week we were joined by a chaplain whose guidance was far more useful than strapping and schlepping might be, and a sign that the systems of medicine - wounded by pandemics and amputated by political tomfoolery - may also capable of healing.

The practice of paramedicine is really very new. Training the transporters makes sense - EMT’s assess, paramedics stabilize - with a narrow scope to diagnose and treat en route between life as it was and whatever it is that comes next. Many emergency departments require their techs to be EMT’s who can continue the assessing as patients are transported to destinations in the hospital suited to their particular needs. My classmates and I have been focused on these two elements, which are tested on the national registry exam, which we must pass in order to be licensed and employable.

While we haven’t yet been handed the scissors, our main doctrine of trauma is to expose. As in, to remove clothing and visualize skin to assess the damage and make a go at stopping the bleeding.

But Tuesday, instead of pulse checks and breath sounds, or shimmying Mr. Silicone to and fro, we learned about the human element of what we might one day do as we are sitting in the back of an ambulance with a human in non-linear dimensional transit. Life-altering paths seem to take us neither closer to nor farther from life as it was before.

I would like to think, particularly as a person who teaches people how to hold space and as a person who hosts a periodic gathering called The Holding Space Ship, that I have some skill and experience on this topic. Maybe expertise? And indeed I must. I’m not concerned about what to say and not say as someone ricochets emotionally from whatever emergency stitches us together requiring assessment and transport, but I’m curious how my fellows in class feel on the matter.

The chaplain plunged the room into darkness as the wind raged outside our enclosed porch classroom and rain started, and she stepped us through a two hour powerpoint on grief and trauma as though we were strangers to the human experience.

And we are, I’m afraid. Each of us somehow humaning in a system that is mechanical and linear, which divorces us of this experience even as it unfolds.

I noticed that I became lost in the soupy theoreticals - what a chaplain who wrote this presentation for doctors thinks EMT’s might experience. She probably isn’t wrong - or - I can’t really say as I’m also in a precognitive theoretical experience. But I felt my mind, my heart, my soul, and the ghosts I carry with me each tug me in different directions as we tumbled and stumbled through endless blocks of color adorned with individual trauma words like “bodily” and “existential.”

I have begged the heavens for some color coded blocks I could sort to understand and convey and organize this sticky grief work, but alas all I’ve got so far is the washing machine that gathered us here today at the top of this infernal meandering latte.

The emotional washing machine is my avatar of this process because it is cyclical. It makes worse before better. Grody things emerge faded, pilled, and cross contaminated, and often requiring a thorough rinse or squeeze before being laid out to dry. Nothing that has ever escaped the embrace of the washing machine ever looked as nice as it did at the store, although often times they are more comfortable, forgiving, and familiar.

We do not require the machine to manage the process of grief, but most of us are equally unskilled to launder our unmentionable feelings without it - as in a hotel sink with shampoo. Certainly once gnarly emotions pile up, virtual nothing is passable for shared company.

The chaplain was here to tell us was what to do between, as we ride the liminal space with laundry and emotions spewn about. When we float back to awareness that the body in front of us has needs and desires, and can be both exposed and covered, and that we are somehow charged with nothing and everything and once.

It’s doula work, by any other name, without the fancy dogma or color blocked words.

Anyway, thanks for reading

K

*while as a Kwinn was not permitted a Barbie of any gender in my youth, I was still somehow aware that Barbie’s of all genders lack this. Perhaps you’ve spent your sleepless ceiling tile counting hours wondering if it is weirder for dolls to be anatomically correct and I will say I’m now squarely unsettled by all options.