Excerpt from "Weaning the Vent"

As I slid into an exhausted sleep, memories of the last two and a half years floated past me; the gnawing nervousness I felt during my first ED shift and the amazing girth of my first patient (a woman with mysterious abdominal pain); walking home in bright East Sacramento morning sun after a 12-hour night shift and being ‘chauffeured” to work by Angela for early morning rounds; practicing intubations on surgical patients in the operating room and the horror of chipping a patient’s tooth in the process; a favorite attending teaching me the proper way to place a thumb spica splint and an hour of practicing on Angela at home; taking parents to the quiet room to tell them that their son was dead, a victim of random gun violence, and running after a psychiatric patient who was trying to abscond from the hospital, naked; a patient in the hallway of the ED whose primary complaint was coprophagia (eating shit) while a man with diarrhea raced by, trying, unsuccessfully, to reach the bathroom in time; a frustrated ED attending telling me as I attempted to place a central line catheter, “Ballard, you have bricks for hands,” and a disaffected attending saying “I’ll be napping in my office, call me if anyone is going to die;” cleaning maggots from an old man’s feet and removing scalpels from a young man’s urethra; harassing a crotchety nurse to do her job and being harassed, in turn, regarding my horrific, chicken-scratch handwriting; the glorious feeling of a night off from work and a drunken round of Cranium with friends, and the ache in my stomach before a week-long string of shifts; a wonderful delayed honeymoon to Maui and the simple joy of an overdue vacation with my wife; the feelings of self-doubt and loathing after failing to diagnose cardiac stent occlusion compared to the triumphant feeling of nailing a lumbar puncture on the first try; serving beers and relationship advice to Karl and listening to his panicked phone message the day he misplaced his cell phone; attempting to climb Mount Shasta the day after a night shift and the look of dread on Angela’s face as I slipped and tumbled down a glacier directly past her; the pain of working with a massive bruise and abrasions to my buttocks from my failed mountaineering expedition and the stupidity trying to play basketball the next day; a methamphetamine tweaker strapped to and humping a backboard and a meth cooker whose lab exploded in his face; sick patients of all shapes and sizes and circumstances…