I'm Andy and this is my campfire story. I'm in an emergency room, doctor.

I got a 20-hour leg ankle.

We deal with things in the emergency room almost every day that are life and death.

We're going to be taking her straight to the operating room over nine. I try to leave my life open to being able to engage with a patient in a special way.

I can remember times where I've got to cry with patients and I have quite a few patients

that I think I'll carry in my mind for the rest of my life.

I'd say it's really taxing to deal with these life and death issues all the time.

It really takes a lot more from you than you realize. And even when you start the process of becoming a doc and becoming

an ER doc specifically, I don't know that you ever really can know just how much it's going to require,

that you pay from your own life and from your own emotion. You have to have relationships to find encouragement.

I think I had a lot of questions, and I've always had a lot of questions about my faith and what I was reading,

and how that squared with the way that I saw people practice their faith.

I didn't find a safe place to ask those questions or people that were willing to engage

with the hard parts of those questions.

I think I was discouraged from engaging in community.

Don't be really honest, I had some bad experiences with church and with faith communities

and had some hurtful

things happen when my family and I really needed the church to be there for us.

And that might mean that that faith was invalid.

Recently I sent a question for an Ask Curtis episode.

Today, we have a special way to help each other make sense of the world.

We're doing a Ask Me Anything episode.

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