You enter the emergency room with a large gash on some part of your body. You’ve stopped the bleeding, but you are in a lot of pain. You tell the triage nurse what the problem is, rate your pain from a scale of 1 to 10, and you are told to sit and wait your turn. Now, you may have rated your pain an “8”, but you are holding it together and not screaming your head off. You look over to see who is taken back to see the doctor in front of you. It’s someone who is screaming his or her head off, so you are thinking an arm is missing. Nope, the stomach is hurting. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “it must be appendicitis.” Nope again. You overhear the nurses talking, and it’s actually bad gas. But that person is triaged ahead of you, because he or she rated the pain level as “10.”
Sometimes I feel like we triage people emotionally in the same fashion. Those that appear strong-- those that don’t scream and cry and act as if they will lose their mind at any second-- those are triaged behind the “squeaky wheels.” When individuals who are strong are continuously placed behind others, though, there will be damage. Just as a cut left unattended will leave a nasty scar, emotional needs left unattended will leave nasty emotional scars. And just as some physical scars never stop hurting, the same is case with emotional scars. The difference between the two: With physical scars, you immediately see where a person was damaged; and you can work to provide better care to that person. With an emotional scar, often you can’t see the scar, so better care isn’t provided; and soon, the person you knew is no longer the same. That’s why, no matter what, you have to triage based on the need and not the noise.
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound”
~William Shakespeare
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