Desensitised

I lost a patient this morning. Young, no history of severe disease, and gone so suddenly. It hurt, but, I can admit, not as much as the first death I experienced. Not by a long shot. But I’m still young in the field, have barely scratched the surface of what I will witness, what I will fail to prevent. I know the pain will get dimmer, and dimmer, until it doesn’t hurt so bad.

It scares me, sometimes, the lengths the mind will go to protect itself. I understand that this desensitisation to something normally devastating that I will come across many times is a defense mechanism, to keep me from breaking.

But it got me to thinking; what does it do to our armed forces – our soldiers, our police officers? People who have witnessed death and violence on such massive scales, people who have sometimes orchestrated it themselves. At what point of this protective desensitisation do they become so completely devoid of humanity as to see their fellow citizens as little more than sentient flesh and bones?

As a doctor, there’s a fail-safe mechanism in place for my desensitisation; my oath of benevolence and non-malevolence gives me back the compassion I may have lost. I know and believe that my duty is to save lives.

But what protects the world from a person whose oath is sworn, not to human life and its preservation, but to a non-living entity like a state, a government, a movement?

Do we have any measures in place to pull them back from the precipice of inhumanity?

How can we, with no remorse, insinuate them into violent situations where the absence of compassion can lead to the loss of life?

It’s terrifying, really, to realise that we’ve brought into existence an entire group of people for whom the loss of a single human life is not a tragedy too heartbreaking to bear, and that we have no measures in place to coax them back into caring.