January 23rd in Posso's Prompts

What job did you envision yourself having as a kid? What do you do now?

As a kid, I always dreamed I was going to become some sort of medical professional. Saving someone’s life always seemed amazing to me. Complicated yet so simple to see them either live or die. I couldn’t get enough pictures of broken bones, blood, accidents when I was younger. Not for sick reasons but out of sheer fascination as to how someone could survive injuries - run after breaking a leg, get shot in the face and still be able to speak. I wanted to make that difference and do what I could to help.

Then I came to Madison and I got severely sidetracked by college.

At one point, I became a paramedic. Having been punished and removed from UW-Madison for a semester, I had decided to go to the city tech college and take classes. After going through the school ordeal (that part has always been easy for me) I started working for a rig outside of the Madison city limits. They had me doing all the new grunt work. Many ride alongs were aiding elderly people on transports; ones that thought they were dying until they shit themselves in the back of an ambulance. The big patient that always stood out to me was responding to a call of a man that jumped off of bridge overpass onto the Beltline (a main highway in and out of Madison for those that don’t know) Obviously, there were some grim and very serious injuries but between my coworkers and I, we were able to keep his vital signs stable enough and get him into surgery at the hospital. My next shift my supervisor came up to me and apologized about the bad news. I had no clue what she was talking about. The patient we had spent 45 minutes frantically doing everything within human limits to keep alive had strangled himself in the hospital with his IV line.

Something had clicked after that. I wasn’t really the same and the motivation to further my career and try to become a doctor just wasn’t there. “What’s the point of saving someone if they’re just going to kill themselves anyway?”

That’s a common question and something I find myself having to ask everyday.

As a bartender now, that comes into discussion more often than one thinks about. The normal person views what I do as a job. I get paid to do it, to provide a service for others to use. The problem is, it’s more than a job. Does the average person walk into your assembly line and start venting about how traffic is terrible and they need to have a drink to take off the edge? Guaranteed you’ve never been interrupted while doing research in a lab with someone crying out, “nobody loves me, what am I doing wrong? Maybe they’ll miss me if I’m gone.” There isn’t another job I can think of where you are working and everyone brings you their problems and literally they don’t have to pay for anything more than the medicine they drink. Tipping’s optional, sure, but sure as fuck don’t count on me listening to your sob stories and whining when I can stare at the TV. There’s a service industry standard that compares bartenders to therapists; bartenders just don’t have the degrees and get paid less. There’s an extreme feeling of helplessness sometimes when considering the only helping I’m doing for this person is to get them drunk so they either forget what they want to do or make the next big terrible decision. What’s the point in saving someone if they’re just going to come back and get drunk and make me relive the same scenario again tomorrow?

It makes me realize that I’d rather save lives than watch the infinite spiral some take.