The Breakfast Club

Mmm, breakfast! Let me explain a couple things for those of you who may not have any experience working night shift in a ER. Your co-workers are your family. The doctors, nurses, techs, respiratory therapists, firefighters, cops, paramedics, etc that you work with are the closest kind of family there is. It's like the dead dads club from Grey's Anatomy. You can't be in it till you're in it. Lots of people can understand parts of your day and parts of your job, but you just can't know until you've been there night in and night out and seen all the best and worst that humanity has to offer. I've worked in other places, and I think that you get close to your coworkers no matter where you work or the profession that you're in, but nothing compares to the ER. Like I said, you can't know until you know, so I'm not going to sped a lot of time trying to explain. Lots of people go out to eat with coworkers after work, but it's not the same. When a group of us gets together to unwind, only we can understand the pain on each other's faces over the 9 month old we were unable to save after he was beat by his parents, The baby who died after being on a ventilator for a month after it was born at 25 weeks and weighing less than a pound. The look on the family's face who is suddenly without one or both parents because of some drunk driver, and watching them trying to deal with that while not being able to tune out the crazy drunk person across the department shouting profanities at the top of his lungs. See, now I'm getting away from the point of this post ...believe it or not, it wasn't to make you sad, or to point out what we deal with at work --it really is just another day to us. It has to be, or else it would eat us alive.

The point was, that we have a great time every Friday morning at breakfast. It's our own little breakfast club. Some of us get off at 5:30, and others don't get off till 7:30. The bar opens at six (yes, the bar ...nope, still don't drink :) ) so those of us that get off at 5:30 play pool, or just hang out and talk until our 7:30 friends get there, then we order food, play some more, and enjoy not having other people's lives in our hands. It's kind of like our own little therapy where we repress all the depression and carnage from the week before deep down inside because we can't talk about it outside of work to any one. Privacy laws. But we all know. It's part of the club. I love breakfast days! It's one of the things I'm going to miss the most when I leave this place, so I thought I'd share it with you. The following pics are from breakfast last Friday, where we said goodbye to Anne, one of the travellers that works with us.