Yesterday Mama Zen asked a serious question, and me being me I gave a flip answer. Sadly, I do a lot of that. The thing is, I think she deserves a better answer.
The question is why do people pay more attention to their failures with respect to the people we try to save than to their successes? For instance, if some nurses came across a traffic accident and managed to save the passenger, but lost the driver, why talk about the one that died more than the one that lived.
I think maybe it had to do with learning curves. A survival can be marked down as a success – something that went the way it was supposed to. Unless the number of successes is so small that a survivor becomes an aberration, it is easiest to categorize it with all the others like it. A failure, on the other hand, is something to learn from.
Could the failure have been turned around with the addition of a blanket? What about more pressure during CPR? Quicker response to any lacerations? A check for internal bleeding? It’s important to know these things. It’s important to care because there might be another situation like it, and you don’t want to do the same things and end up with the same results. Especially when you are talking about someone’s life.
Add in a measure of guilt or how one values oneself, and the stakes get so high you can’t NOT think about it.
Am I on the right track? What do you think? Have you ever made a mistake you couldn’t help but obsess over?
5 Responses to The Ones the Wolves Pull Down, Redux