Calm in the Storm: Through the Eyes of Veterinary ER Chaos
Imagine this.
It is January 2nd, the day after New Year’s. You are a new graduate veterinarian working a shift in an emergency hospital. Due to staffing constraints, instead of the three vets and six nurses that you were meant to have, only you and a nurse are available to manage incoming consults and a hospital full of emergency, medical, and surgical in-patients.
The Rising Storm
The storm begins with a sickly old dachshund and a bladder full of cancer.
As you are scanning the little dachshund’s bladder, your receptionist brings in a Staffy who was found playing with an eastern brown snake. The venom of an eastern brown can cause horrific internal bleeding and paralysis, so the dachshund has to wait. You get blood tests running on the Staffy and then speak with the owners of the dachshund. They decide to put her to sleep, so you make them comfortable in a room and let them spend some time with her.
The second you walk out of the consulting room, your nurse alerts you that the Staffy has tested positive for a snake envenomation, and another patient has walked in—a wobbly Maremma on the verge of collapse. Your heart sinks. Anti-venom treatment meant that you would lose your only nurse for a minimum of 15 minutes, as she would have to sit with the Staffy to monitor it for anaphylaxis while administering the anti-venom. But it has to be done, so she starts the anti-venom.
Meanwhile, you attempt to place an intravenous cannula into the Maremma on your own with a tourniquet, desperately hoping it will not bite you. Midway through the IV placement, your receptionist comes flying in with a very floppy cat and heads for the crash bench, yelling, “I need a vet!”.
That’s you again. You’re the only vet today. You get swept up into the storm.
You abandon the IV, half-placed, and run to the bench. It is an acutely paralyzed cat, yowling in pain. You stabilize it and consult the owners while your nurse wraps up your half-placed IV in the Maremma. The owners of the cat have no funds for surgery and, after a very emotional conversation, decide to put her to sleep as well.
Fully aware that the family of the little dachshund has been waiting for quite some time at this point, you hurriedly usher the family with the cat into another private room to say goodbye and go to the family with the dachshund. You apologize profusely and begin the euthanasia process. Just as you are about to administer the final injection, the crash bench alarm and lights go off, and your nurse bursts through the consulting door with another limp dog in her arms, with blood pouring from its nose and mouth.
The storm intensifies.
You apologize again to the family of the little dachshund and run with your nurse to the crash bench. You intubate the bleeding dog, and blood comes pouring out of the tube. The dog goes into cardiac arrest; the owners decline CPR, and the dog passes away. The receptionist then walks in with a kitten, severely ill and bloated. At the same moment, your nurse runs in with another deathly ill dog and heads for the crash bench. One of the hospitalized dogs starts barking incessantly, but no one has time to check on it at this point.
The Eye of the Storm
They say there is quiet in the eye of a storm. You pause and look around you.
You are greeted with the blood-soaked body of the dog that had just passed, the Maremma with a fever, the snake-bit Staffy, the crash-bench dog, and the critically ill, bloated kitten. Inside the consult rooms are two clients patiently waiting for you to put their beloved pets to sleep. Outside in the waiting room, there is a line of patients who are stable enough to not warrant any of your attention at the moment but are still waiting for you to consult, some of whom require intensive medical workups. To top it all off, there was an ICU full of in-patients that you have not even had the chance to glance at yet.
Imagine that.
I don’t have to imagine it, I lived it. I was that new graduate veterinarian.
It was January 2nd, the day after New Year’s. A day meant for us to implement our newly made New Year’s Resolutions (before it inadvertently goes downhill), to exert some sense of control over our lives. Me? I was flailing, completely out of my depth. The word control felt further from me than my motivation to exercise. To say I was stressed would have been a severe understatement.
Finding Your Calm in the Storm
What did I do? I said a quick prayer and dove straight back into the storm, still flailing but not falling apart.
Later that night, after the shift, I lay in bed, running through the events of the day. The next day, I talked it through with a friend and discussed what I could have done better.
Therein lies my stress management strategy in a nutshell: Prayer. Reflection. Preparation.
Prayer: Finding Inner Stillness
There is a reason why Philippians 4:6 gets thrown around so much to people who are stressed and anxious because it’s true.
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, present your requests to God.”
It is a verse thrown at us so much that it doesn’t even register anymore. But the fact that it has become somewhat of a platitude doesn’t make it any less true. Don’t be anxious, but pray.
In praying, we acknowledge that we are presenting our requests to a God who cares and a God who is in control. What relief, what comfort!
However the outcome, you know that the God who loves you beyond comprehension has orchestrated it perfectly for your good and His glory. If you are stressing more than you are praying, you know deep down that you are trusting yourself with the situation more than you are trusting in God.
Reflection: Extracting Lessons
It is often said that “we do not learn from experience, but by reflecting on experience.” As someone who has way too many thoughts in my mind, I reflect on them a lot. I try to spot what could’ve been done better, what was a missed opportunity, and what could have been more godly. It is only by reflection that I can do the next step.
Preparation: Equipping Yourself
While it is true that God is entirely in control, we are also called to be good stewards of what we are given, and I do believe that includes things that may cause us stress. I have gone through enough stress working in the Emergency Room (and before that, juggling five jobs while studying!) to have learned that the most stressful moments and the biggest mistakes are often the biggest learning opportunities.
I saw 12 urgent consults in four hours that day—five of which I could not save, five of which survived after intensive care, and two of which went home with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Did I make decisions that I regretted? Yes, but now I won’t make the same ones anymore. Did anything die directly because of my mistake? No. But could it happen the next time? Possibly, but now I’ll be prepared for it.
The Final Storm
Stress will come in life, don’t waste it. Use it to learn to handle the next stressor better, calmer, and most importantly, in a more godly manner. Use it to be more effective for His Kingdom. Ultimately, nothing else matters. Life’s little storms of stress pale in comparison to the final storm—death.
There is no quiet in the eye of this storm, just the horrific realization that everything you love and fought for in this life will be ripped from you one day.
Finding True Eternal Calm
But what comfort do we find in the name of Jesus?
Jesus, who defeated death and sin, who gives hope, and who promises to make all things new. Jesus walked through the storm of death and separation from God so that we will never have to. It is this same Jesus who walks with us in our everyday stresses, listens to our pleas, and uses our circumstances for our sanctification.
It is this same Jesus who will one day deliver us from death and bring us to a place where sorrows and tears will be no more. Enveloped in His glory, the very thought of stress will be a distant memory.
Imagine that.
You don’t have to. He is true.
