Days Four and Five

So Day Four is called a "regular work day" where you just monitor the patient, try new things to make them better, or send them home. No new patients. Day Five is "pre-call" and is much of the same. The best case scenario is that you've discharged all the patients you got on long and short call, and are ready to start long call the next morning with no patients left over! Yeah, right.

Changing gears:
Today marks an interesting day. 9/11 has for several years now been the epicenter of intense politics, but to me it carries a different meaning. Every year as 9/11 approaches, I groan inwardly, knowing that people will get all worked up about this day, but then completely forget about it the rest of the year save for the politicians who continue to evoke it to their benefit. If this day just passed every year without anyone noticing, I'd be okay with that. It's like Valentine's Day - you're not supposed to love your significant other only on Valentine's Day, you're supposed to every day. Yet the commercialization and superficiality that is synonymous with V-day is pretty nauseating. Inasmuch, those who sacrificed their lives to save others should be remembered privately all the time, not staged once a year into a political tool.

I woke up today like any other day. Of course, I was aware that it was 9/11, but it didn't compel me to do anything differently than I would any other day. However, I was driving along PCH to go study at my favorite Starbucks this afternoon, when all of a sudden, there were hundreds of firefighters on motorcycles driving north. As I continued south, there were local fire engines parked along PCH, waving at the motorcycles. It was a huge, noisy spectacle, as cars and motorcycles honked and firefighters stood atop their rigs with their emergency lights flashing, waving at the motorcyclists as they thudded by.

I suddenly became really "homesick" for my fire family back home up north. How many other professions do this? Can you imagine hundreds of CPAs rallying together on a giant motorcycle ride to remember their own who were killed in New York seven years ago? Firefighters are pretty unique, along with the few other professions where you must live together despite your differences and sometimes rely on each other with your lives. I never had any Backdraft moments of falling through the roof into a fire, but there are countless less sexy or dramatic times when my ass was saved by someone I worked with. I haven't forgotten what it is to be a firefighter. The job and the landscape where my firefighter self was born, trained, lived and worked, has changed me for good.

I wish everyone could experience such a tie to their brethren - known and unknown - sometime in their lives. The world would be a better place for it. And that would be the best way to pay respects on such a day like this for those who gave their lives, unarmed but for rescue tools, surely terrified, but still answering the call for help.