88 | Death and Dying in emergency medicine | Pastor Daniel Grothe | New panel | Burnout comradery

Whatever your beliefs regarding God or lack of a God as you work in emergency medicine, I hope this episode will uplift and encourage you

New panel! Welcome Pastor Daniel Grothe, ER Physician Eric and ER PA Laurie

Daniel talks about the life of a pastor, which isn’t exactly as we all might assume. He talks about being a brand new, young pastor and how he responded to the home after the suicide of a 16-year-old boy

One of his first calls as the pastor on-call was the death of a 7-month-old boy

His experience, being a young pastor, not fully trained in how to handle the most difficult of scenarios, but jumping in anyway is not dissimilar to being a new EMT or paramedic

He’s not worrying about the medicine aspects like we do but his frequency of dealing with death and dying is very similar to my experience

He talks about how we come into peoples lives where they are and try to bring healing to them, and this can be costly for us as well

The ratios of doing the big things like weddings and sermons to the dealing with death and dying is not what you might expect as a pastor, a large portion of time is spent walking through the valley of the shadow of death with others

Laurie talks about an ER she used to work at and the amount of trauma they saw that was often not survivable

I recount the cardiac arrest of a 4-year-old I ran years ago and how this caused me to wrestle with God

Daniel talks about the times he has wrestled with God. Including the time New Life Church had an active shooter on campus that killed two young girls

Christians often want to see things like the stories in the book of Acts, miracles. But Acts takes place in 5 cities over 40 years. So, Daniel says, stick around a place for 40 years and you will see all of those things happen while also attending funerals and seeing death

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Daniel looks at what we do as working on this side of eternity to participate with God to be God’s representative to those that are suffering

We all get into the field to help others, but this can get lost in the tasks we have to do during the day

We have to remember that our actions and how we treat patients, regardless of complaint can demonstrate God’s love

Burnout comradery is a problem when we all get in a feedback cycle of complaining about the day and the patients.  It might feel good in the moment, but it leads to burnout

“That smelly homeless person that just puked on my shoes is made in the image of God”

We can choose to be the peace and calm in every scenario

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Everything you hear today from myself and my guests is opinion only and doesn’t represent any organizations or companies that any of us are affiliated with. The stories you hear have been modified to protect patient privacy and any resemblance to real individuals is coincidental. This is for educational and entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice nor used to diagnose any medical or healthcare conditions.