Summary

“Emergency Room Notebook, 1977” is a first person narrative about Lucia, which is also the author's first name. Lucia is a nurse in an emergency room. She explains how ambulances turn off the sirens on the approach to the emergency bay and how medical staff behave during Code Three calls, in which the patients are critical. She uses gallows humor to cope with witnessing loss of life. She thinks “in terms of good or bad deaths” (90). Bad deaths involve reaching out to estranged family members or learning how a cleaning woman found a body. Good deaths involve family actively mourning or patients peacefully dying. She thinks of what patients have with them, such as bus schedules and dentures. She compares the patients’ complaints with diagnoses from tension headaches to heart attacks. She references the drunks who are alone and the suicides who come in...