Bad Day

Broke down and cried in the ER today.

The ER tech, a former co-worker, came to my room and gave me the news. One of PGHNSTRACH’s other ER clerks lost her six year old son today.

ATV accident, head-on collision with his older brother. Some of our medics brought him to the ER, desperately working to resuscitate him. If I hadn’t been in my own ER room right about then, it may very well have been me working the code – it happened in my response district.

And I might have kept it together too, if I hadn’t had a serious case of the shakes resulting from coming off my own adrenaline high.

In case you missed the reference, I was laid up in the ER myself this afternoon, brought in by yet another of The Borg’s ambulances. A lady from Texas driving a beat up Chevy Cavalier tried her best to kill me on the way to work today.

She damned near succeeded.

I’m banged up, folks, but reasonably intact. I cannot say the same for my bike, my cell phone, my laptop, my CPAP, and my uniform. All are totaled.*

I’ll post more on it later, but right now my friend and co-worker could use some prayers. When you pray tonight, if praying is something that you do, might you ask God to look down with some special mercy on a grieving mother in southwest Louisiana tonight? She needs it.

Right now I’m going to go hobble to bed, pop a handful of Motrin, and cry myself to sleep. I’ll blog tomorrow.

*For those of you well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning commenters who are tempted to use this as a platform to decry the inherent danger of motorcycles and ATVs, save it. I’m hurt, and upset, and not in the mood to read it, well-meant or not. I’m not going to stop riding.