Life, Death, Madness - Page 2


I feel wide awake, pumped up. I prize this feeling—a razor-sharp sense of purpose, laced with something like fear—in the moment I confront a new situation, a new family. I came to this regional public hospital four years ago, assigned first to the inpatient psychiatry unit and then to the Emergency Department, where I now work. One of 30 social workers among 6,000 hospital employees, I'm called on in the midst of emotional crisis, when family or patient turmoil becomes too intense for medical staff to handle. It's psychotherapy in the moment, with people I don't know and may never see again—people facing some of the most terrible moments of their lives.

I'm not new to crisis work. Before coming to the hospital, I spent nine years counseling county prison inmates, men who regularly dissolved into rage or tears, threatened suicide, or vowed to kill someone. Earlier, I directed a Salvation Army shelter for teen runaways who required 24-hour care. And now, at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I'm standing beneath blazing fluorescent lights in a hospital hallway and readying myself to meet a distraught family. I feel in my bones that this is vital work; I want to do the best I can for the people I'm about to meet.

At the same time, I want to flee. I want to burrow back into bed and escape all this tumult and pain, this unrelenting test of my ability to be of any use. I've been doing crisis work, in one form or another, for nearly 30 years. I've confronted a number of forks in my professional road, opportunities to take a less demanding route. But I've chosen to continue on this path, accompanying others who've been suddenly, often brutally, cast out of life's safety zones. The reasons I stay aren't simple, and they continue to shift and surprise me.

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