TCNJ

24 The College of New Jersey Magazine when you're in a conversation, you always have to be listening to every- thing around you — listening for the subtle clues, the change in that alarm or someone moaning differently than they did five minutes ago. You have to be totally aware of your surroundings at all times. Even in kindergarten, I can remem- ber saying, "I want to be a doctor." My mother was originally an ER nurse and when I was 5 years old she switched to school nursing. She also volunteered with the ambu- lance squad. When she would go out on a call, I'd be waiting for her to get home to tell us about it. I was always fascinated. As soon as I was able to, I joined the squad. I took the first part of the certification course the summer before I turned 16. At the time, I was also doing a community theater produc- tion. So, I was in rehearsals with all these other teenagers, and I would be sitting in the corner of the auditorium reading my EMT book and studying while everybody else was socializing and hanging out because I wanted to do this so badly. My birthday was in August and my mom and I put ourselves on call that day. The first call was someone having remember the very first time I did CPR on somebody. It was a young person who died from an opioid overdose. I was a 16-year-old kid, and a volunteer on our town ambulance squad. I went home that night and, as I was siing down to dinner, I was like, "How do I eat with these hands? I did this thing on this person and he's not alive anymore." It was a very profound moment for me of realizing the full spectrum of life. That really stuck with me. I "You always have to be listening to everything around you … the change in that alarm or someone moaning differently than they did five minutes ago." Being on the ambulance squad meant that all my interactions with medicine were in the emergency room. I just couldn't get enough of it. The summer before I went to college, I got a job as a clerk in the emergency room at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, close to where I grew up. I would go home on all my breaks and work a full- time schedule. I saw physicians work- ing in the ER and that was my dream. They were kind of my idols of what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would take in as much as I could about every- thing that was going on. A lot of people have a sensation- alized idea of what it's like to be an emergency physician because of TV. The vast majority of what we do is not life-threatening emergencies. Most of the cases are abdominal pain, chest pain, dizziness, and vague symptoms where we have to figure out what it is, like solving mysteries. People use the phrase "organized chaos" for what the ER is. There's a ton of people around, there's all sorts of alarms, there's noise. Depending on where you work, you could have emo- tionally distressed patients, you can have people in pain. There is so much stimulation. And, you have to some- how learn how to live in the midst of all that and still maintain your ability to really pay attention to people. Even

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