My first post...

I recently finished a book by Patricia Grimes called "Just Trying to Save A Few Lives", or something like that (it's funny...I remember the author's name but not the title of the book--maybe she should have just titled it "Grimy stories"), and it gave me the idea that I need to start keeping track of these encounters for....something (posterity? book deal? sanity?). So, at risk of becoming the third wheel at Chelsea's female blogging club, I'm going to interject here and there.

But now that I'm typing, I'm sort of at a loss as to where to begin. I get the request for a story all the time when I tell someone what I do, and I seem to always be at this same loss. The problem is that nearly all of the stories that come to mind either are either really morbid/tragic or involve objects inserted into bodily orifices where they shouldn't (and you would often think--couldn't) fit.

Well, there's the Thanksgiving that I spent in the "thumb" of Michigan where I sent home a little girl who had a cold with her mom and older brother, only to see her come back by ambulance with her mother 45 minutes later, brother decapitated in a car accident, mother with a displaced elbow fracture and screaming "Where is my son? What happened to my son?" (do I tell her? or do I just sedate her so she doesn't permanently wreck her arm?) , and little girl trying to act brave through it all, and then having to contact the divorced father across the state to tell him his son is dead, all this with one nurse and six other patients wondering why I'm taking so long to get to them...

Sort of a conversation killer.

I don't want to have the reputation of "the weird doctor who works at night all the time and pssst...I think it's gotten to him." So, while I'm sure I'll hit the "slipped in the shower and happened to land right on this hairdryer" stories, I would like to record some of the everyday entertaining encounters that make me love my job.

But I really don't know where to begin. The story I really want to tell, the one that's timely and hilariously funny (as opposed to just funny), falls into that second category and will probably make everyone wonder just what kind of guy Chelsea is now stuck with forever. I'm sure I'll get around to it in a few weeks when everyone has learned to skip my posts, but it's really not a good icebreaker. So for now, it's a slow Tuesday morning shift (the kind I rarely get as the low guy on the totem pole) and maybe something will walk through the door and give me something to talk about.