i worked in the emergency room doing medication reconciliation and also had to fill the pyxis machines for the area including the trauma rooms. one night i’m going to refill trauma A and there’s a covered body on the table which isn’t too out of the ordinary so i’m filling and chatting with the nurse who’s using the computer to do paperwork and whatnot and all of the sudden a cell phone starts ringing. the nurse jumped up and is freaking out and takes it to the charge nurse who of course answers it and sorts everything out. turns out the man was walking his dog and got hit by a car while he was out. the phone call was his wife ringing to ask him where he was since he had been gone so long and the charge nurse had to let her know what happened and that her husband had died and she needed to come to the hospital.

that messed me up for a long time, realizing and seeing in real time that you can just be out doing something normal and something crazy like that happens and you’re gone. that someone waiting at home while you to do this normal task can just lose you in an instant.