The night a gunman fired into a crowd of 22,000 people at the country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, nursing supervisor Antoinette Mullan at University Medical Center was focused on one thing: saving lives.
She recalls dead bodies on gurneys across the triage floor, a trauma bay full of victims. But "in that moment, we're not aware of anything else but taking care of what's in front of us," Mullan says.
She calls that event, "the most horrific evening of my life." But in a career spanning 30 years, Mullan has experienced plenty of other tragic incidents in which she witnessed suffering and death. .. Research shows that emergency first responders suffer from the accumulation of stress and trauma. First responders report feeling depression, job burnout, substance abuse, troubled relationships — even suicide. Many studies have found elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder among nurses, firefighters and paramedics.