This is a special edition of the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast dedicated to the memory of Dr. Barbara Tatum.

I'm Anton Hellman.

The original recording this podcast was on August 28, 2019 at my family cottage on the southern shores of Lake Simco in southern Ontario, about an hour outside of Toronto.

I invited Dr. Tatum for the day to discuss physician compassion

amongst acres of forest with the sound of waves lapping up on the small beach,

interrupted only by the occasional bird call and barking of our family dog.

We're going to share the heartbreaking personal story of our beloved EM colleague.

Please be prepared for some strong emotional content.

You may notice that Dr. Tatum sounds short of breath on the podcast, and that's because

she had an undiagnosed pulmonary embolism at the time of the recording.

We emergency physicians get thrust into the front lines like all the time.

We see blood and pain and gore and extreme emotions almost on a daily basis.

EM seems to attract people with bravery and fortitude to endure extraordinary successes, followed by extraordinary catastrophes, repeatedly. But EM also requires compassion and empathy in our

tumultuous environment. In a way, EM is sort of the perfect example of medicine being practiced

at the intersection of science and

humanity. How do we leave the trauma-based resuscitation rooms and bereavement rooms and

continue our lives with family and friends without a warped perspective on humanity? Well,

us humans luckily have the innate ability to compartmentalize and depersonalize repeated traumatic events.

We see this in famines and in wars.

It's how we protect ourselves so that we can get on with that pediatric airway or thoracotomy or whatever.

Those moments of depersonalization ensures that we get the job done step by step,

nuance by nuance, perform as experts, even in the face of total chaos.

...