CLEVELAND — Everyone's lives are touched when there's a shooting, from the victims to the community and the doctors and first responders working to save lives.
"I don't want people to become immune to the anger the anxiety that occurs," Dr. Edward Barksdale, Chief of Pediatric Surgery at UH Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, says. "I want them to lean into action."
Even after decades of treating children, Barksdale still needs time to process what he's seen when a child comes into the operating room with a gunshot wound. He says just has to push it aside until after he's done everything he can.
"You can't help but go into the humanity mode," he explained. "That is the one of compassion, that is the mode of empathy for the child for the family and even for the community."
But seeing these injuries over and over can take a toll. That's why Barksdale says it's important for people to talk about what they've seen, especially when dealing with injuries he believes are preventable.
"We are trained as healers, we are trained to correct and improve the human condition," he said. "It is the ultimate form of impotence and it's the ultimate for that leads to anger, and the term I've used before is 'moral outrage.'"
While surgeons are on the front lines, Barksdale has also seen the impact these tragedies have on communities, and asks people pay attention and don't go numb.
"As the voyeur or witness to the violence, this is seeping into our spirit," he added. "What concerns me the most is it's almost like a type of infection. You get little bits of the infection over and over again that we get fed through the media of these episodes, that we become the horror."
Just like surgeons, Barksdale says we need to feel and process the pain and grief when something as tragic as a mass shooting at an elementary school is heavy on our minds.