What is your “Why?”
What is your “why?”
I learned a long time ago that perspective is everything. In the heart of the COVID era, I lost perspective. I couldn’t remember my ‘why’ to save my life, almost literally. A job that I once loved became a chore and after almost two decades in public service, I lost my purpose and began to look for a way out. I just felt like I was not making a difference. A Bachelors Degree, a change of scenery 805 miles away, and new responsibilities gave me new purpose and saved me from burnout.
Fast forward to this week and I am really struggling again. I worked three days and over two of those days, I ran around 15 calls. I didn’t need to ask a single one of those patients their name and only needed birthdates from a handful of them. I have them memorized. They were all familiar faces, in a revolving door in and out of the hospital, with one having been discharged just one hour prior to calling again. Not one of those patients had stayed out of the hospital for more than a week. The hospital staff joked with me that their empty ER was not an invitation to fill it up again. I laughed and then glanced down the row, realizing that every patient in every room as far as I could see had been placed there by me in the last six hours. I found myself asking some familiar questions. What am I doing? What is the point of bringing people here just so they can leave and come right back?
It’s easy to forget that I work in an underserved community. The discharge instruction “follow up with your primary care physician” doesn’t mean anything because there isn’t a PCP within 50 miles accepting new patients, not that many of the folks we serve could make it 50 miles anyway. And so, we return, again and again and again, without end and with no expectation of it getting better any time soon. It sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? The problem is that when you’re prone to burning out, it’s difficult to see your way out of that hopelessness. Just because I have written a book about burning out does not make me any less susceptible to a repeat performance. The difference is that I have been through it before, done the work to fight back, reinvented myself and created new purpose.
As much as I would love to, I have no control over any of this. I don’t possess a fraction of the resources to solve the problem of community under service in healthcare. Even if I did, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that where one frequent flyer leaves off, a new one always takes their place.
So I have two choices. I can let it eat me up, or I can remember my “why.” Writing helps me to keep that in focus. I became a captain to serve those who serve others. I find great satisfaction in taking care of my employees and being a resource for them when they feel just the way I have felt this week. There’s also one other thing that I love about management. I get to have some small part in shaping the future of EMS and of the organization I work for. We as an industry don’t have the money to fully solve the problems because the federal government and the public at large still haven’t recognized that there are problems to solve, but they will. EMS services across the country can’t continue to exist using current reimbursement rates and methodologies, so it is only a matter of time until the cards fall and the funding comes. Until then, I get to play a small part in keeping the system from falling apart completely.
Burnout is ubiquitous industry wide and as long as I have breath in my lungs, I will continue to be the voice for my peers who are struggling and will fight to keep them focused on their individual purposes, and that doesn’t feel so hopeless after all. So, again I ask, what is your “why?”