PULSE Magazine | August 2019 Issue PE

Ariel Jewell, Clinical Specialist-Field

If you know me well at all, you know I’m a sucker for animals. Especially dogs. How many times have you gone into someone’s home and paid more attention to the dog in the house than the human? We all tend to get a little crispy doing this job at some point and need little reminders to have a little more compassion and empathy. Dogs teach us those lessons with simple body language. I recently had the opportunity to make a positive impact in both a human and dog(s) life and had the rare opportunity to learn those lessons. I was dispatched to a P4Psych call about a month ago. We had to make forcible entry because the patient was making threats on his life and wouldn’t open the door for APD. After trying to get him to answer the door for an hour, they finally called us. We quickly realized he didn’t real- ly have a need for EMS and with an MHO on scene it would have been easy enough to walk away and let them take care of getting him to the appropriate facility. However, this was one of those times I simply could not walk away. He was very anxious about leaving his two elderly little dogs behind, and with good reason. One of them was very frail and needed insulin injections twice a day. With the patient going on a 72 hour hold that would not be possible. He also had no friends or family willing to help him out. As I loved on the dogs and looked around his home, I saw a shrine on a book shelf to all of the pets that have come and gone in his life and I realized if he came home from the hospital and his 2 dogs were dead, he would be too. It was quite obvious that, in that moment, their lives mattered more to him than his own. I just couldn’t walk away without trying to help. I made arrangements with a friend of mine that fosters for Austin Pets Alive to help me to take care of the dogs. Between the two of us we were able to give the diabetic dog his shots twice a day and keep them alive while he was in the hospital. Afterward, he and I were able to chat. He told me that he had lost all hope and had given up. However, he realized while he was in the hospital that there are still good people in the world and that I had given him hope to keep going by the kindness I had showed him and his dogs.

I learned some valuable lessons that day:

1. Even though someone doesn’t necessarily need us in a medical capacity, that doesn’t mean that we can’t help them in some other meaningful way. 2. Even though you may be having a bad day, somebody else is having a worse one (I had been “Carled” that morning for 24hrs on M8 and was not happy to be at work).

3. Sometimes we need reminders to be good humans. When we are burnt out it’s easy to lose our compassion and empathy for others. I definitely needed to be reminded that I still had some of both left to give. What I hope to impart by sharing this story is the lessons that I learned and hope that you too will recognize the opportunity to help someone in a way that we don’t normally get a chance to. A random act of kindness can have a ripple effect far beyond what you might imagine.

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