Detach

The complete seasons of "Scrubs" was recently release on Netflix.  Even before I entered the fun world of medicine, I took to Scrubs like a moth to a flame.  It was it's quirky comedy and JD's internal dialogue that appealed to me.  JD the young eager doctor, the guy who cares too much, the one with unwavering faith. Summers in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit can test that.  There is a certain level of detachment that occurs in the Medical Intensive Care Unit.  Patients have a tendency to have long stand co-morbidities that just need an acute kindey injury or a COPD exacerbation to land them in the ICU.  These patients have known suffering and live with their illness day in and day out, sometimes too long but that's another topic all together.  Rather in the Surgical intensive care unit it's quiet the opposite.  It's hard for a health care worker not to feel a level of attachment to a patient who's lives parallels yours.  The healthy thirty year old father of two who is now a recent quad secondary to a fall from a ladder at work or the previously healthy forty year old mother of three who was in a horrific car accident on the way to lake with her family.

We have a certain level of intemcy with these patients.  We see them when they are at the brink of death and we see them as their injuries evolve. We often spend hours at their bedsides doing whatever is medically capable to save them.  It's hard not to see these patients and think.. "This could have been my brother, my sister, heck it could have been me."  Yet we detach.   We detach because we have to.  Because we need to.


It's the only way to make it out alive kid,
N