Episode
61: Mad Dogs And Servicemen
Frank: That
man is a psycho and for some perverted reason these two want to play games with
him.
Hawkeye: We
are just following Sid Freedman’s advice.
Trapper: You
get a soldier who has hysterical paralysis and you treat him as though he is
really paralysed and he’ll become sick just to rationalise the guilt of leaving
his buddies at the front.
Hawkeye: Sid
feels if you take a patient like that back to a nice clean hospital it just
deepens the guilt. You send him home and
it sets it in concrete.
Trapper: Yeah,
he has been treating his patients as close to the front as possible with the idea
that they will return to their unit.
Hawkeye: Otherwise,
they get sent stateside and one moment’s failure on the battlefield becomes a
lifetime disability.
A GI is brought in by ambulance suffering from
hysterical paralysis. Hawkeye attempts
to treat him with a new method being used by Psychiatrist Sidney Freedman,
against the protests of Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan who question his
condition.
I am sure most of us understand what it means ‘to be
paralysed by fear’; to be so terrified of something, real or perceived, that you
are unable to move. Imagine being
paralysed by failure; to be crippled by your mistakes to the point where you
can no longer function. This is a
critical condition for any leader because failure comes with the territory! Identifying “failure as an indispensable,
irreplaceable part of learning and growth,” John Ortberg stresses “failure does
not shape you; the way you respond to failure shapes you.” So, you can choose to allow failure to
paralyse you or propel you towards new discoveries. Don’t allow a moment of failure become a
lifetime of disability.