The Night Shift Doctor

You think you know what happens in an ER after midnight. You have seen the TV shows. The handsome doctors. The patients who wake up just in time for the credits. That is not real. Real is a janitor saving a life because he saw something on a scan the radiologist missed. Real is a seventeen-year-old boy doing CPR on his grandmother for eleven minutes while humming a song. Real is a homeless man asking to watch the sunrise before he goes back to the street. Real is a mother punching a wall because she cannot afford four dollars for medicine. Real is a psychiatrist screaming for forty-five minutes because she has no words left. This book is those stories. Twenty-three of them. True ones. The names changed. The blood real. The tears real. The laughs real. The deaths real. I am a surgeon. I have worked the night shift for over a decade. I have held the hand of the dying. I have made the wrong call. I have been bitten by a patient with dementia. I have been given a broken watch by a woman who had nothing else to give. I wrote this book because someone had to tell what really happens when the lights go low and the world goes to sleep and the worst parts of life come through the same set of doors. This is not a book about medicine. It is a book about people. Scared people. Brave people. Broken people. Healing people. And the doctor who sat with them in the dark.