Curse....

Sometimes I think this job can be a curse. Not the everyday work, just the knowledge. My wife is pregnant with our first child. I went to the cath lab at the local hospital the other day for paramedic clinicals. I ended up in the pediatric lab. There were all these little bears and clowns and other assorted cartoons on the walls. I asked the nurse that was precepting me how many actual kids they do caths on. She said that 2 days a week they usually have a full schedule, somewhere between 12-20 per day. Of course these are kids with birth defects and the like. She gave me a book to look over while they were preparing for a cath and there was nothing that I could do. It was full of all kinds of defects that kids can have, it was over 2 inches thick with small type. This on top of all the other things that can go wrong. I was talking about this and various other things with the wife, she's got 2 kids from a previous marriage, both healthy. She says that I shouldn't worry myself as much as I do. I try to take her advise, but I guess sometimes I can't get it out of my head. Kids have a hard enough time trying to make it in this world when they have 10 fingers, 10 toes and all their organs in the right place. But to take any of that away and the difficulty increases infinitely. I know that there are people out there with disabled children and I mean no disrespect. I'm not worried about how I will deal with it, I just want my child to be happy and healthy. The other way this "knowledge" is a curse is with other family members and loved ones. Sometimes the doctors don't always tell them the whole truth and then they ask me what I think, like I know anything. On the rare occasions that I do know a little something, I face a dilemma, to tell or not to tell? Then there's the times that you actually run someone that you know. That's happened to me a few times, I ran my second cousin who was so badly hurt that I didn't recognise him until much later when another family member asked me about it, then my grandmother who took too many nitro's and bottomed out her pressure. Not sure how to get around this. I've been told that you should never tech a call when it's someone you know if you can help it. Try to let your partner do it if possible. With my cousin, I never knew it was him, so it didn't bother me and with my grandmother I wasn't working, just responding off-duty when I heard the address over the radio. Not sure if I could stand back and let someone else work when its someone I know and love. I guess like so many other things in life, I'll cross that bridge when it comes.