Emergency Room (急诊室, 救急処置室, 응급실)

One of the greatest things about living a mundane, no-risk life is not having to go to the hospital outside of some earwax cleanup and acne medication when I was younger, almost never, and I have gone exactly zero times to an emergency room, usually reserved for the most urgent cases with dire need and possible life-threatening conditions. MJ and I went to urgent care which is one step below the emergency room, just to get some medication: seemed relaxed, controlled, and just one nurse practitioner on staff running tests and prescribing medciations. We were in and out of there in half an hour, no hassle and no line, and no life-threatening conditions, no sight of blood. That seems totally different from what I've hard of (and seen on TV shows like the Pitt and ER) about how emergency rooms operate: controlled chaos of multiple doctors and nurses running around to address as many cases as they can or the hospital has beds to hold patients, going off a board that looks a lot like a list of departures and arrivals at a major city airport, lots of blood and breathing tubes and various wounds and damaged body parts that normally would make anyone queasy out in public, becomes commonplace in the ER. And that's just inside the treatment center, there's a whole lobby of patients waiting to be seen and checked out who may have been waiting for hours to just get past those doors, ironically shut out because their issues are not that serious: the worse shape you are in, the faster you get seen: it's a perverse relationship of amount of pain and severity to length of time spent waiting: almost like you should hurt yourself more to get seen faster. Would I be a good patient at the ER? Probably not, I'm impatient and try to avoid lines as much a possible, don't like admitting when I have a problem and hope it just goes away (I have a nerve in my back that aches every time I sit for too long that's gone on for more than a year), and don't like the smell of hospitals in general. MJ and I do have great health insurance right now, though: we're on the gold plan, which allows us various procedures but also costs me every month in the form of having to pay for other people's treatment through my premiums. Would I be a good doctor or nurse at the ER? Probably not. There are so many things I am that don't fit the qualifications for being a doctor, despite my parents' hopes and dreams for me when I was a kid to pick the stethoscope when going through the "pick a job symbol" ceremony. a.) I didn't have patience to stay with one endeavor for 10 years through med school and residency and everything just to finally become something that I might even want to be....doctors have to actually know what they're doing; I've faked it through most of life now but doctors have to make a call on someone's life: it isn't the low-level decisionmaking at my day to day job, doctors especially in the ER are making life and death decisions. I'm not confident enough that I'd make enough good calls, and I also second-guess myself and do postmordems (not literal ones) about bad decisions like I made in chess, stocks, fantasy baseball, etc. that I'm sure I'd be killing myself if I was a doctor. Also my hands-on dexterity abilities are rather poor: I colored outside the lines in kindergarten and couldn't do good stitching in home economics class, kind of what you need to do quickly in an emergency. I WOULD probably stay calm under pressure, as emergency rooms are like if car crashes happen over and over again and you have to deal with the fallout; I would sympathize with the patients and not be dismissive of their concerns, and I would like to be on my feet all time time doing something dynamic and trying to juggle many balls at once; I actually enjoy that type of activity when managing events, etc. My childhood friend told me recently about his brother who works as a real-life ER nurse: he works 12-hour shifts for 10 days out of 14, and then just goes back to his regular assignment, and since he maintains a good relationship with the nurses and staff, he can get away with resting during the shift and watching the Super Bowl in his office. Doesn't sound that bad! That's kind of what I do, work 5 days out of 7 every week. Maybe this whole ER doctor thing is not as tense and action packed every second as depicted on TV. I just hope I never end up in one!