The World Sucks, and Medicine is Hard. Save Us Jesus.

I've had a few more days of experience in the ER and the burdens of the world have been weighing heavy on my heart. It is a rough environment, the ER, and as one of my professors put it "nobody comes to the ER on their best day." Here's a list of a few things I saw the past few days:

-A man severely addicted to alcohol and withdrawing (fyi: alcohol is the most dangerous substance to withdrawal from. Not cocaine, heroine, meth, or anything else you can think of, but alcohol)
-A woman who is 30 and has already been divorced twice.
-Numerous children with only one parent (those who are reading, don't get all offended by this. I was raised by a single parent, and my dad is a better parent by himself then most people are together, but one cannot deny that a solid, two parent home is the most ideal situation).
-A sexual assault victim needing a forensic exam.
-More foul and offensive language then I've heard in my entire life (not by patients I might add...)

The list goes on and on. And in the midst of all this, I am thankful that I became a Christian years ago, because it makes coping with all of this a little easier. Christianity gets minimized by modern society to a lot of rules and is portrayed as hatred (and I do apologize for those people, but hateful people come in all forms and flavors of Christian, Atheist, Islamic, Hindu, etc, and those of us actually trying to find truth have a huge task of cleaning up the mess that our particular flavor makes, so please be patient and kind to everybody. Disclaimer ended). But what does it mean to be a Christian? Why can I cope with all the things I see in the ER easier then if I wasn't a Christian?  It means to understand that people are broken, but that we don't have to heal ourselves or each other alone. What a huge task that would be!! It's difficult to fix something broken with something else that is broken. Everyone has there own struggles and ugliness, and broken people cannot fix other broken people. BUT!! There is a God who cares for and loves us, so much that even though people do the ugliest things to each other, He still wants to spend eternity with us, so his son, Jesus, who lived a perfect life, always kind, forgiving, and selfless, died taking all of our burdens onto himself. It means that I have hope that there can be healing and redemption of horrible situations, even as I'm inundated in one of the world's most desperate places, the emergency room.

And the alarming part of working in the ER is that almost every provider, whether physician, PA, nurse, etc., has made it very clear that they are not 'spiritual' as they like to say. They are not religious, and they like to make it known. So my question is, how on earth do they deal with working there? There is no higher being, no God, just people. Day after day with nothing but death, tragedy, and illness, where do they find hope?  Medicine? Medicine is really a big guessing game. Using a story a patient tells, a physical exam, and maybe some labs we make our best guess at what is wrong and choose what we think might be the best treatment for it is. That fails often, and we don't have medicine for many many things. Science? How does science fix the woman's heart who's husband of 60 years just died? People? Whether we like to admit or not, even the nicest people do hurtful things and have their own burdens. How to we deal with the tragedy and weight of working in medicine?

So to wrap it up, my benediction, for the lack of better words, to my colleagues is this: If all you believe in is people (or science or medicine), I can only imagine how heavy the burden of a career in health care is going to be as we are the healers of the body, mind, and heart. Our job is to get involved and dig deep into people's lives, and what we often find is horrifying. People and this world are ugly, medicine fails, and there are severe limitations to scientific knowledge. I cope by knowing that Jesus heals and redeems all ailments, and that I am just privileged enough to get to help. I know that the burdens of this world are not mine, because thankfully, Jesus bore every burden when he died for us on the cross.