Read Online The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky - Free Book Online

that for weeks, waiting to read about the fire. I probably should have sent him upstairs to see the pro shrinks – at least then it wouldn’t be on my conscience if anything happened.
    Maybe, just maybe, if I cared more about the “underlying pathologies,” I would have spotted Miller earlier, right? I’m rambling – I know it, but it’s hard not to ramble when you’re just trying to do the best you can, and all you really want to do is sleep. Ever fall asleep while you’re driving? That’s what it’s like – you’re so tired that you can feel your eyelids dropping, even though you know exactly how dangerous it is. Your head messes you up – just for a second, your eyelids say, just for a second. Coming back from a day in the country, everyone a little sunburned and sleepy, and the next thing you know you’re in a hospital bed and you’re alone, everyone else having died in the emergency room hallway or before the fire fighters could even cut them out of my suv.
    Sorry. I’m just sorry. So I work harder, and carry crosses like this guy.
    I was fading right there in the room with Miller, fading, though he seemed like a real dangerous guy tobe ignoring, even for a moment. He was telling me about his apartment, about how it was bugged, about how his knees were shot from driving and he lived above a stereo shop.
    â€œThat’s what I did, see, is I took all the styrofoam from the empty boxes, just the flat sheets from in front of the screens, and I put that down all over the apartment floors, see, because it lessens the impact. Also the noise.” He was talking faster, kind of gabbling, and I was still collecting symptoms, or at least keeping track of them, checking them off as he went. Nothing I could cure in this guy, so I wanted to be rid of him – although the styrofoam, that seemed like a good idea.
    Impatience – that was a big problem with me. If you can’t fix ’em right away, make the diagnosis and shift ’em upstairs. That’s one reason I work well in emergency – you keep them moving, and only do the magic that you’re sure you can deliver.
    I always thought my hands were magic – that’s the kicker, really. I’d be sewing someone up – real fine work, a cut over an eyebrow or somewhere a scar would show real easily, and it would be as if I was standing back and my hands were doing the work all by themselves. Fine work, too, not the slap-dash needlepoint that some doctors call stitches – if it was someone I ran into again later, I’d always keep an eye out, to see if the scar was as fine as I expected it to be.
    Not a lot of people like to work the emergency room shifts. The hours are a killer for family life, forone, and then there’s the chance of doing something wrong: get someone on the table with their chest filling up with blood, a crushing chest injury like hitting the dashboard when you’re speeding along at 100, and you’ve got to get a tube in there and drain things before the lungs collapse.
    But the emergency room is to medicine like slaughtering cattle is to working in a French restaurant – the emergency room is fast, messy medicine, and you’re pushing a tube in between someone’s ribs and hoping you don’t accidentally do more damage in there.
    It’s got to be done, and quickly. Otherwise some-body’s wife just dies there in the hallway while her husband’s unconscious and can’t tell the other doctors what they should be doing. It’s best guesses, and heaven help you if you guess wrong, because even if the families never figure out what you did wrong, you know it. I always figured that if anything happened, I’d be able to do something about it – I never figured I’d be a patient, too, the kind who wakes up three days after an accident and can only remember what they tell him