“There was a group in the ER I worked at that all did back-
country snowboarding. I just loved the challenge of that. There
were a lot of runners, people who did marathons and distance
running. I think a lot of us do more extreme things in other areas
of our lives also. I mean we don’t all have the same personality, but
after work, we would breakfast after a night shift and debrief it and
just be like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it was so crazy when this person came in
and we had nowhere to put them and we had to pull that person to
the hallway and we had to do a shoulder reduction in triage at the
same time and...’ I think we like it and are always trying to top
everyone else’s story on what was the craziest thing that
happened.”
These do not sound like people who would like a desk job,
and when I pointed this out to Hannah she heartily agreed. “Oh, no.
Not at all. Like now, I work in a clinic because, over here in the UK,
there weren’t as many job opportunities, so I work in a clinic and
I’m just bored because exciting things don’t happen that often...
I’m looking forward to going back to something more like critical
care.”
It was beginning to sound like I had found the perfect job for
the HSS, but when I looked at the research, it didn’t seem to
corroborate my theory. A study done in 1987 showed that English
medical students scored lower on the general sensation-seeking
survey than arts and sciences and even agriculture students.^5 And
while it has been shown that within the medical community emer-
gency room physicians score higher than their counterparts who
limit themselves to professional practice or teaching, it doesn’t
necessarily follow that ER physicians and nurses are inherently
high sensation-seeking. This didn’t seem to fit with what Hannah
was telling me at all.
When I asked my colleague Dr. Philip Shayne, who runs the
program at Emory University that trains emergency room clini-
cians, about the correlation between high sensation-seeking and
success in the ER, his response was immediate and to the point:
“That’s part of it. Emergency medicine is a big, complicated field,
and chaos is a normal for us. You need to be able to handle that, you
need to be able to deal with a large amount of ambiguity and
different information sources. We’re sort of the interface between
the chaos of the streets and the orderliness of the hospital. There
are also moments of adrenaline that you need to be able to handle,
and ideally you enjoy.122 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge