Written by: Nick Harris, Class of ‘25 DPT Student

“Men and women for others.”

This is a compelling message, and one that we as healthcare providers and students live by. When taking this message at face value, one realizes that the act of putting it into practice is nebulous at best.

Some hear this message and go into healthcare. Others pick up a weapon and enforce the law.

As a police officer, you are indeed helping others, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. When I was putting a 14-year-old girl in a twist-lock because she was attacking her mother, I didn’t feel like I was helping. I wasn’t repairing their relationship. I wasn’t alleviating their pain.

Eventually, I realized the only way for me to survive with my values and, indeed, my sanity intact, was to close my heart to it.

My heart was in a steel casket at one point. Safe, but also distant and cold.

Safe in that casket, dark, motionless, airless, I felt it change. It did not break.

It became unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

That was the final nail in the coffin of my career in police work.

I knew that how I felt wasn’t a sentiment shared by my former colleagues, so I knew that I needed to leave. The transition to physical therapy school has been challenging at times. I needed to change my outlook, my approach to helping others. While challenging, I feel I made the right choice. I still have a deep respect for law enforcement and the people who choose it as a profession, but I believe it was not the right choice for me.

Now I have the opportunity to open my heart again, and it is liberating.