The call came at 11:47 p.m. on a Thursday.
I was already mostly asleep, which was unusual, the kind of sleep that came after a week of long shifts and one significant emotional conversation and the accumulated weight of a life that had been running at high intensity for longer than I sometimes allowed myself to calculate. My phone went off and I was upright before the second ring, the way I had trained myself to be, the body understanding the sound before the mind caught up.
The ER attending’s voice. A child, eight years old. Car accident on the West Side Highway, the kind of impact that produced injuries with a specific pattern I recognized from the description before he finished giving it. Internal, multiple, the surgical complexity that meant other people had looked at the scans and r
