I would say that when it comes to party roles in MMOs, the healer role is one where you need to keep a level head, and be able to keep track of what everyone is doing. Everyone is taking damage at different rates, and you have to make sure you aren't standing in the fire yourself while keeping line of sight with the people you need to heal, and keeping everyone topped up enough to survive an attack, and trying to conserve your mana. I used to find it really stressful, but after a while, I started to get in the zone, and it almost feels like time slows down, while you try to calculate which heal is the most mana efficient but still enough to keep the tank alive, while still leaving you enough time to finish casting before the next ground AoE attack triggers.
Unlike in real life, if the party wipes, the worst that'll happen is that you get yelled at, or the party disbands and you have to try again. Everyone respawns, and loses a bit of gold for dying, but life goes on.
I think I've had my quota for time spent with medical staff this year. There was a medical emergency at work, and I was asked to help as the closest first aider. I won't go into the details, but I found that it affected me a lot more than I thought it would.
Panic is ridiculously contagious. Things started out OK, but when it took a turn for the worst, I could almost feel the moment in which something snapped inside me. It was a weird feeling of being slow and being fast at the same time. It felt like time had slowed, as I could feel hundreds of thoughts entering my brain at once, but at the same time, it felt like time was rushing by, and it was like I was stretching my hands out, trying to catch one of those thoughts as it floated by, but they were moving in such a blur that I couldn't tell the good thoughts from the bad thoughts, and in the time it took me to analyse one, it flew out of my hand.
The one thought that I did have throughout everything was that I couldn't let the other person realise how panicked I was, because the last thing you want to see when your life is in someone else's hands is that they have an expression saying, "I have no idea what to do".
I always imagined that I'd stay level-headed when an emergency hit. I mean, I can do it in games, and they're fairly high stress situations, and I do it at work, so it'll be the same, right? Nope. I guess not.
I do feel a lot more vindicated in my choice not to pursue medicine. It was originally my first preference for uni courses, and even though I absolutely tanked the emotional intelligence segment, apparently Melbourne Uni had a double weighting for the logical thinking segment, and I crushed that. I initially thought my ENTER was too low, but I met someone whose score was lower than mine, and she got in. A part of me always wondered if that was meant to be my path and not programming. Sure, I'm squeamish around bodily fluids, but not every aspect of medicine involves dealing with that. And I like helping people.
Anyway, despite my almost-BSOD, I have finally decided what my New Year's resolution is going to be. It's something I've wanted to do for a few years, and I thought about doing it this year, but the 365 day photo/blog ball and chain was too heavy to drag along with me. I'm going to become a St John's Ambulance volunteer. You would think that I should run away screaming from anything like this, but people have accidents all the time, and if it was someone that I really cared about, I can't afford to lose it and collapse in a heap. First aid is a skill, like any other, and maybe if I practised it more than once every 3 years, and had to do more than put a band-aid on someone, I might not panic next time.
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