I’ll intellectually/emotionally/physically hard as answers. For me its either 12 hours straight “punching tubes” on a very large scotch marine firetube boiler at the beginning of my career or Easter around a decade ago when I was working with troubled teens and had to engage in 5 separate protective holds in one 16 hour double shift. The former was all physical and the latter was a combination of emotional and physical.
Worked 33h in a row as a paramedic. Normally not allowed here (24h is a hard limit, 12h standard). Not because I wanted to, not because someone got ill…we simply didn’t make it even close to the depot, for the last 4h simply a major crash happened right in front of us.
We returned to the depot and basically didn’t even have a single wound dressing, no O2, no collars, no blankets,nothing.
And the worst part: The whole time it wasn’t “the usual business” of old folks having a stroke or a fall. We had one mass casualty incident at the beginning of shift, a child in respiratory arrest and similar shit.
I slept for 12h straight after that and still felt like shit.
What a champion
Nope. Just an idiot. Shouldn’t have done the double shift. Overtime happens in this job.
And while I did not kill/hurt someone back then (as far as I know) I massively increased my patients risk of suffering from one - and I surely would have treated them at least faster.
Today I would never take this risk again voluntarily again - there are situations that might warrant it (I have responded to a few major disasters, mainly floods, over the years), but these are rare. That back then? That was stupid. In so many ways.
I figured there was no choice when you said it wasn’t because you wanted to, and was due to mass casualty incident