6.
“I worked in the emergency unit of a rural hospital in a third-world country when two women arrived with more than 60% total body surface area burns after a gas canister in the school kitchen, where they volunteered, exploded. Both were fully conscious. I treated them aggressively and made arrangements for transfer to a hospital equipped to treat them. Given the prognosis, I was sad but not surprised to hear one woman passed away within hours. Since I hadn’t heard about the second woman, I assumed she died as well. For weeks, I had trouble adjusting to the idea that the last thing they heard was me saying, ‘Hi, I’m Dr. [Name]. You got very badly burnt. I gave you some strong pain stuff, but I’m worried about damage to your face, so I’m going to give you something to make you sleep and put a tube in your lungs to protect them, ok?’ Months later, I got a call: ‘There’s someone here that you absolutely want to see.’ It was the second woman.”
“When they came in, I’d given them morphine, fluids, and burn dressings and intubated both to protect their airways. However, the prognosis was extremely poor due to ongoing damage and associated complications. At that stage, I worked in a very fragmented system, so I didn’t know what had happened to the second woman after she was transferred.
She had been through hell — skin grafts, rehabilitation, depression — but against the odds, she had survived. She also immediately recognized me as the one who said, ‘I’m going to give you something to make you sleep,’ but she remembered it more favorably than I did. It was easily the happiest day of my entire career so far, and I’ve been practicing for give or take 11 years now.” —u/blueginpinktonic
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriavouloumanos/best-day-on-emotionally-stressful-job