A Difficult Departure
From the Wilderness Medical Society magazine article: www.wms.org
A story about a stress response in a first responder and the resilience of a patient.
Stress injuries or reactive stress response incurred by first responders and medical staff may be due to chronic exposure that causes emotional, cognitive, and even physical depletion over time, or just a single trigger event. Informal evaluation tools like the stress continuum scale referenced in this story can help you recognize when you are ready to be out in the field going for a big objective, leading a SAR team, or working in the ER making significant decisions regarding others, or, a day to lay low and just hit the skate skiing track or ask a colleague to take the hard cases.
There are days when we should be operating with a wider margin of safety not just because of the weather, snowpack, river flow, etc., but also because of our mental state. This story illustrates such a moment, and the value of having a tool to both evaluate our status as well as provide a language to communicate this information to our partners – either recreational or professional.
(An adaptation of the Stress Continuum Scale can be found in the Medical Conditions section of the Wilderness Medicine Reference App by Wild Med Etrier.)
