As much as this is good advice, it's not always possible to know your limits until you find them. Last year, I worked a fatal wreck with a member who, until that moment, had only worked on wrecks that did not involve a death.

We waited a long time for the coroner to come and tell us that the dead guy was in fact dead, and in that time, we kind of stood around looking at the car and studying how it wrecked, and after a while, we became oblivious to the body in the car. When the coroner showed up, he assessed the body, stood up from the car and said, "Cut him out" and then we set to work. We were doing fine, going really slowly, not taking any risks. Then came the time to actually start pulling he body out, and while I had noticed early in the extrication process that the guys legs had been cut off just above the knees, the woman working with me on the job did not, and she did not react well at all. Although she helped me pull the guy out, she never ran a call with us again after that. But she seemed OK, and didn't hit a limit until it was quite late.

To the point of the gore and yuck factor. It's a human being, even when it's a dead body. We are all built from the same parts and fluids, we all break in the same ways, and if you look at a compound fracture or an amputation as an urgent repair needed on a fantastic machine, it's a lot easier. I always see the messy jobs as a major problem to be solved - stop the leaks, keep things from getting worse, keep the machine going until experts can work on it.