The Malaysian airliner incident has got me thinking about this, even though it’s not likely to come into play in this particular case.
Let me preface the question with this: most of us have at least one largely irrational fear that bedevils us. Mine happens to be of dead animals. Whether it’s roadkill from the safe distance of a passing car or a dead bird in my yard, they just freak me out and I can’t deal with them. Something about the aspect they’re caught in as they meet their doom, I guess. It’s just as much their faces as it is the blood and guts that makes me not want to look at any cost.
So I can’t even begin to imagine how I would deal with human beings in this same state. Which leads to my question: how are those who are dispatched to the scene of a military action, plane wreck, a fire, or any kind of disaster (natural or man-made) where serious injury or death is present trained to deal with something that causes revulsion in most of us?
I’m sure they have to be made of stronger stuff than most to begin with, but I’m curious as to what techniques can be and are used to overcome the natural aversion.
This could apply equally to Paramedics/EMT’s, who have to scrape people off of the road after a car accident — or just as bad if not worse, have to deal with people still alive but in the throes of agony. And let’s add coroners/medical examiners into the mix.
Apparently there are some people who actually get off on this stuff (remember the “Faces of Death” film that made the rounds some years ago?). But there must be others who just grit their teeth and get on with this horrifying work.
From my perspective, I’m trying to figure out how they do it. Any and all insights appreciated.
I can’t speak from firsthand experience, but I read a lot on the subject of WWII. The answer always seems to be, you get used to it and after a while it just doesn’t bother you any longer. Most men who are recounting their combat experiences seem to say that the sight of dead and mangled bodies made them scared, upset, sickened, etc… And almost everyone comments how after seeing it enough they become “hardened” to it and it just doesn’t bother them any longer.
I’ve asked a few firemen and police that I know this very question. The general answer was that virtually everyone throws up when they attend their first fatality, but after that you just get used to it and get on with the job.
I have been relayed and recall stories of my grandfather working for the San Diego County medical examiner in late 70s who was on the scene of a large plane crash (PSA Flight 182) that had a mid air collision and crashed nose first at over 300mph in a San Diego neighborhood.
I recall him and my parents having many a “post dinner time” discussion talking about the carnage and body parts. Apparently this was a particularly gruesome crash where every body was horribly mutilated.
Arms, legs, heads, torsos and lots of loose organs and blood. He said said they collected the body parts in plastic bags, carefully labeling and identifying as they could. I vividly remember him saying there was a time for sadness before and after but during the collection, he had a job to do.
I suspect - like most anything - you adapt, but can only imagine if you were a rookie on that scene.
Not only is it a job, or part of daily living in war, it’s a mitzvah. ZAKA (Zihuy Korbanot Ason, Disaster Victim Identification) inIsrael is a volunteer group sanctioned by the government to work alongside emergency response teams.
I’m certain it pales in comparison with the recovery/handling of mutilated human bodies but you can get a bit of insight into how this works by watching someone react to the first-time experience of gutting a bunch of fish, skinning a few rabbits or for some people, just deboning a chicken - it’s horrific at first, then (assuming they grit their teeth and stick at it), the horror goes away and there’s a sort of emotional disconnect - it becomes a factual, mechanical operation that you just knuckle down and get on with.
Next time, overcoming the revulsion is easier or unnecessary - and so on.
I imagine there’s another level to it when it’s human bodies, because reflection will bring the realisation that lives have ended prematurely; hopes have been dashed, families have been torn apart, however, to a certain extent, even people who don’t have to handle the mess can empathise with the sadness of all that.
When I worked in a hospital, I frequently had lunch in the staff restaurant with the mortuary attendant and, sometimes, his boss. We invariably had a table to ourselves as he would usually want to talk, often in some detail, about what he had been doing that morning.
I think there can be categories, too. There’s getting used to seeing or handling dead bodies. Then there’s an additional reaction if it’s children. At least for a lot of people, when it’s children, they’re back to being a rookie.
Recently I was reading about Air New Zealand Flight 901 that crashed into Mt. Erebus in Antarctica. The wiki entry has an account from one of the recovery team leaders and this:
I’ve talked to a few guys in emergency services and my MIL is a nurse who worked ER and surgery. It seems to come down to a mix of training, experience and being professional, a ‘get the job done and then react in private’ attitude that lets them get by.
I’ve read from time to time that cadaver dogs are so traumatized by their work that they sometimes suffer PTSD (or some canine recognizable equivalent), and/or must be retired.
Includes description, in exquisite gruesome detail of the death of Soviet Cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko in a fire during a training accident.
Excerpt (spoilered for gruesomeness):
[spoiler] As Golyakhovsky remembered it, a severely burned man identified only as “Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant,” was brought in by stretcher. “I couldn’t help shuddering,” Golyakhovsky recalled. “The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. … It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive…”
Golyakhovsky saw the man’s mouth moving and bent down to listen. “Too much pain – do something, please – to kill the pain” were the tortured words he could make out.
“Sergeyev” was scorched everywhere but the soles of his feet, where his flight boots had offered some protection from the flames. With great dimculty the doctors inserted intravenous lines into his feet (they couldn’t find blood vessels anywhere else) and administered painkillers and medication. “Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed,” Golyakhovsky remembered realizing immediately. “And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering.” The man lingered for sixteen hours before dying.
Afterward Golyakhovsky reported talking with a small young officer who had waited by the phone in the lobby while the burned man lay dying. The doctor requested and received an account of the original accident. Details included “an altitude chamber… heavily laden with oxygen” and “a small electric
stove [with] … a rag burst[ingl into flame.” Golyakhovsky was also told that it had taken half an hour to get the pressure chamber open, with “Sergeyev” on fire until the flames consumed almost all the oxygen inside the room. [/spoiler]
Perhaps I should have added a remark, explaining why it’s relevant to this thread (besides being a seeming trollish post just to squick out the OP): The excerpt includes a recounting of an interview with the attending physician, who recalled being traumatized by what he saw.
Been involved with many casualties over the 30+ years i have been an EMT.
It is never easy for me. And like another said, Children are hardest, but by far the hardest for me was the underwater body recovery. That was a long past phobia from drownings that happened when i was very young and my Dad took me and my brothers to the visitation even though some of us didn’t know the two children, but we lived on a lake and were forbidden to swim in that lake because 4 blocks away was a public beach w/life guards.
As for reading, i have done some reading on the Civil war and some of that is so depressing that it might take months to finish a particular biography and some i just can’t.
Another squicky case where the attendants were traumatized: Charla Nash. (The lady who got her face and hands chewed off by a chimpanzee.) You can find pictures on-line of her body above the shoulders (you can’t even call it a face). (Hint: Don’t. google. it. Just. Don’t.) According to some accounts, her attendants and care-givers were so traumatized just at the sight of her, they needed therapy.
One of the things I hoped someone might have some insight into is the training part of this equation. I wondered if anyone had some notion as to what it might consist of…what is said to trainees, or what exercises might be engaged in, that would prepare them to better deal with this trauma. Are there some methods by which the natural reactions can be (if only temporarily) switched off so that one can continue working?
There were tales of rescue dogs after the 9/11 crashes becoming so seemingly depressed by finding only corpses in the rubble that occasionally a rescue worker would secretly hide under some rubble and pretend to be “found” by a dog, in order to lift the poor beast’s spirits.
I can only speak to a few things I did as a student volunteer ‘victim’ helping out the local State Emergency Services for their training.
They had some pretty good make-up people who would apply fake burn blisters and soot/smoke stains or cuts with a lot of ‘blood’, prosthetic bone ends to simulate a protruding fracture or even a gouged out eyeball . Some of the more experienced guys would coach you how to act - “lay there and twitch”, “run around in a panic”, “scream like a steam whistle” and then they would set the exercise in motion and let their people work the problem.
I’ve done a few remote-area first aid courses and a lot of that was running though scenarios in which one person was almost certainly going to die. Your job was to triage the situation to try and minimise casualties.
Years ago I had an elderly coworker who had been a Concentration Camp survivor. He told me that his job was to collect bodies - including those who weren’t quite dead yet - and throw them into a large burning pit. He said the fire rarely went out. I asked them how he could stand doing such a thing. He told me that if he hadn’t done it, he would have been one of the bodies. He said that after some time, he learned to detach himself from what he was doing. Except the babies; he still had nightmares of burning dead babies.
and then they would set the exercise in motion and let their people work the problem.