The thing that really got me with emergency medicine was the moral and ethical context surrounding cases. When it's sufficiently broken the body itself just becomes abstract meat and it's easy to repair something I see as a collection of textbook trivia. Muscle memory shit. But if you go into the field because it engages a sense of empathy, you're empathising with the most traumatic moment of someone's life. Abuse, sex crimes, parents rushing up with dead kids, people with injuries where you can only fix the most basic functions of the meat at the expense of torturing whatever is left of the person. You're with them for that and have to make a genuine connection at least to some degree for rapport and trust. Then five minutes later you have to have dumped it and gone into two other rooms. For twelve hours or more, every other day. Without a pandemic it's such an emotionally exhausting field that it astounds me people can do it for a full career.

Couldn't do the antivaxxers. They're already a demographic I associate with bad mothers disabling or murdering their children out of ignorance. When they finally got hold of a genuinely dangerous virus to inflict on society, the only difference between them and a bioterrorist is sneezing in a container first. When people bring up the demographics that can't or haven't receive(d) the vaccine yet, those are the demographics the plague rats threaten most and yet they squeak it as pseudoaltruism to attack the slogan of abortion rights as well. They're so genuinely evil, irredeemable to the very end, that there's no way I could engage with them and then disengage from them like normal patients. Doing the job now would be so constantly infuriating, with the knowledge that it will only get worse and that there is absolutely no cavalry coming except the literal military medical corps as a stop-gap before systemic collapse. Massive hospital strikes can't come soon enough.