April 2, 2008

• Overcoming Fear

  EDIT:  At least two of my readers were grossed out by the graphic image of the autopsy, so I've replaced it with a more benign picture.  Please come back!  I want you to read what I've written.

  WARNING: One graphic image below is not for the faint of heart.  Proceed at your own risk.

  I have tons of things to say - all of them eminently wise and life-transforming - but rarely the energy or motivation to type it all out.  Depression is a bitch.  I do better on the phone, but only if we talk about YOU.  I care deeply about YOU, and will talk to you as long as you like.  Don't make me talk about me, though, because I don't have much to say unless you get me to reminiscing about the past.

  For similar reasons, I suppose, it's easier for me to comment on other people's blogs than to compose an entry of my own.  And occasionally I leave a comment that has sufficient universality to make it worth posting here.  That's what I'm doing now.  Here's a slightly edited, and expanded, version of the comment I just left on someone else's Xanga.  Thanks for supplying the motivation, my dear, even if it was inadvertent.    You know who you are.

  **********

  I don't know if you're a believer in Jesus the Christ, but whether you are or not, affirmations of faith and courage do work. 

  I
  once had a terror of heights.  Even a stepladder scared me.  One day
  when I was almost 24 years old I decided that I needed to overcome my
  fear of heights.  I was a devout Christian at the time, and staying with a Christian couple who were even more devout than I was. 

  There was a ladder leaning against the side of the
  farmhouse where I was then living.  I stepped up on the bottom rung and
  quoted from the Bible, "I can do all things through Christ who
  strengthens me."  I took another step up, and repeated, "I can do all
  things through Christ who strengthens me."  Another step up, same
  thing.  Before I knew it, I was about 25 feet above the ground, and not
  nearly as terrified as I would normally have been.

  A year later I was
  hired as a firefighter.  One of my very first training exercises - or
  hazing rituals, I suspect - was to climb up to the top of the 85-foot
  aerial ladder and stay up there while those at the controls down below
  spun me around.  I don't imagine you've ever been suspended in midair
  85 feet above the ground, but it's a pretty heady experience.  I was
  very grateful for that earlier self-imposed exercise in overcoming
  fear, and it has stood me in good stead many times since.

                                     

  **********

  To add to the comment above, I also had a great fear of blood and guts, for want of a more delicate term.  Even of dead animals and rotten fruit and vegetables, if you can imagine that.  For a person who has to run rescue calls for a living, that's not a good phobia to have.  So I tried basically the same desensitization technique (which is used, I might add, with considerable success in the field of behavioral psychology).  Since my fiancee at the time was doing her medical residency, I got one of her friends who was a Pathology resident to let me watch one of his autopsies, as a way of trying to desensitize myself. 

  Remember the intro to the old TV show Quincy, where the students all start passing out as the chief forensic pathologist, played by Jack Klugman, begins to cut open the body?  Well, I felt mighty queasy when my friend Motaz made the first incision, slicing open the deceased woman's trunk from top to bottom.  But after I got over that I was fine, and found the entire process utterly fascinating.  I was mesmerized as Motaz detached and studied each internal organ, then finished by peeling the scalp forward over the face and sawing open the skull to examine the brain.  I peered over his shoulder, smoking and flicking cigarette ashes into the basin where the organs and bodily fluids were collected.  (Yes, I was fairly backslidden by that time, a 2-pack-a-day smoker and I guess not terribly respectful of the dead.  Neither are pathologists.)

                                    

  So I survived the autopsy and learned a great deal about the human body.  Unfortunately that experience didn't translate nearly as well to my occupation.  I was still extremely reluctant to deal with patients who were disfigured too badly by their injuries.  Perhaps because I was no longer doing all things through Christ who had formerly strengthened me?

  • 5:57 am
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