procedures that aren’t even allowed in civilian hospitals are routi-
nely performed. In the military, you can do a lot of things you can’t
do in the civilian sector. “I used to assist at putting chest tubes in
depending on where you were at. I put chest tubes in and then you
sew the skin back around it. You almost get to the point where you
look forward to it.”
As a low sensation-seeker, I’d be easily overwhelmed in this
line of work. I can’t imagine having the calmness required to insert
a tube into an injured person’s chest and stitch them shut. I also
can’t imagine a situation in which being a high sensation-seeker
could be more useful, more needed. Yet when I think of Corey’s
story I can see that being an HSS is only a part of the picture. Corey
is a high sensation-seeker, but he is also strong, resilient, persistent,
and intelligent, he has a strong ethical bent, and believes in helping
others. Being a high sensation-seeker is just one aspect of his per-
sonality – albeit an important one – that allows him to thrive in
such extreme conditions. He is a full human being as are all HSSs.
Low sensation-seekers tend to think of high sensation-seekers as
a kind of spectacle – partially because it’s just so darned hard for us
to understand them. Of course, they aren’t. High sensation-seeking
is just another trait and it can be positive or negative. It all depends
on the person and the context.
Corey is well aware of this. Decades have passed and he made
the transition back to civilian life successfully if not easily. He knows
for a fact many of his high sensation-seeking buddies are struggling
with this transition. When he returned to the states, Corey worked
with vets coming home from military engagements. “A lot of my
returning Operation Enduring Freedom men and women were like
that. They were trying to reproduce that extremely rewarding com-
bination. As a matter of fact, one of the guys that I worked with for
a long time, he was a tanker, and he would say things like, ‘They’d
call us in when they couldn’t get the bad guys out of a building. We’d
roll up and take the building down.’ There’s nothing quite like
havingthatpower.”It’shardtogofromthattoadeskjob.
Interestingly, Corey has made this transition completely
and now works in a relatively low sensation-seeking job –
a mental health clinic where about 70 percent of the people he
sees are homeless. He goes and seeks them out – it’s like search and
rescue only under city bridges and in subways instead of behind
enemy lines – and brings them into the clinic where they receive
food, shelter, mental health services, and help getting back on their131 / All in a Day’s WorkDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge