I am happy that I can love my wife and my children dearly. However, the flipside of this is whenever any of them show any signs of getting sick I get extremely worried. I simply do not want anything bad to happen to them, and am worried to go to a doctor too late. My gut instinct is to go to the emergency room for every small issue, but I consciousely understand that this is not a logical response.
Do any of you have suggestions on how I can figure out what an appropriate response to different types of sickness symptoms would be?
Good, that makes it a bit better. Sorry if I am a bit salty about this topic, but I literally had to attend a 13 year old girl who got hit by a car due to someone “racing to hospital” once - was not a pleasant call and ended with life altering injuries. (And the reason for the “emergency” absolute bullshit).
The “drive safely” is relative,btw - even for professionals, believe me. There is a small study that compared the driving skills of regular first responders (lights&siren drivers) in a simulated family/partner/work-partner emergency under regular driving conditions (no lights and sirens) to their normal driving skills. It’s between 4 and 7 times more likely to commit a potentially accident producing traffic infringement.
Anyway: Just because we can send these resources doesn’t mean we always do - emergency medical call takers generally know what they are doing and will ask you the right questions. It won’t be “I need an ambulance, by kid got stuck by a bee in the neck” “okay,we send one,bye!”.
And even if they decide to make it an “all out” call there are plenty of people along the way who can stand resources down once they reach you and assess you. But we would rather send resources 10 times and be not needed 9 times than have the one call that actually needs that response not getting it. So… Don’t be mortified. In doubt,call us.
No need to apologize, you live and breath that stuff and are aware of all the dumb shit regular people like me will do I’m those situations, the harshness is coming from a place of love I can tell. I’ll definitely have your good advice in mind shall something like this occur again, thank you (and thank you for the work you do).