Colors on the street; Red, white, and blue; People shuffling their feet; People sleeping in their shoes ... transcribing in the free world.

Albeit vicariously, I am on my umpteenth straight day of emergency room/emergency admit trauma rotation. I am a medical transcriptionist, have been for 17+ years. The last many years, I have performed my job, from home in my stocking feet, working for facilities throughout the country.

I am lucky in my lot.

It is not so much the same for those I listen to every day of the week, words I hear and must put to the page verbatim. I cannot change the outcomes. I cannot play around with each story. It happens as it happens and I am here to document.

It's a bloody job, but someone has to do it in the name of patient care and continuity of medical histories.

This time of year, things are especially "bloody," and sometimes just bloody ridiculous.

On a "normal" day there are burst appendices, women in labor, lacerated fingers and broken toes, the more than occasional shooting and upteen-million traffic violations leading to the masses being brought in on back boards with cervical spine precautions. Congested hearts fail, taxed lungs seize a final time, brains short out and people, more often than I like, simply bleed out. That's a normal day.

There have been special days when I've had my hand in (so to speak) on separating Siamese twins, relatively tricky brain surgeries, rebuilding of vascular systems, openly reducing and internally fixating many a broken bone, and (twice-removed) placing the tiny stitches that reapproximate something a patient feared could never be fixed.

Factor in the holidays and the real games begin.

Though I cannot name names, spout locations and must always protect the confidentiality of my "patients," I will offer these tidbits of advice as the holiday season gets in full swing:

***Please, let's all stop hurting ourselves ***

-If your stomach has been stapled, don't eat that third piece of cake.
-Quit punching your brother in the head!
-Beware your seafood allergies.
-Take your psychotropic medications every day.
-Drink less and maybe you wouldn't have a crescent laceration above your eye and a chipped commode.
-Take your blood pressure medications, check your blood sugar and keep your heart at rest.
-Do not T-bone the next door neighbor with your new SUV.
-Put that gun down!!!!
-Wear your glasses when you read and drive.
-When you go horseback riding, biking, skiing, snowboarding, snowmobiling or ride any motorized off-road or water craft ... PLEASE WEAR A HELMET!
-Wash your hands after you piss.
-If your baby is due soon, please tell me you had prenatal care and you are taking your vitamins. -
-Wear a condom or suffer the consequence.
-Sleep with your own wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend.
-Stop hitting the kids.
-Quit shaking your babies.
-Do not bring your great-grandmother in for a headache because you need the Vicodin. Take 12-steps in another direction.
-Cover your mouth when you cough.
-Take that bowl of peanuts away from that two-year-old who is running with a tinker toy in their mouth.
-Designate a driver.
-Love yourself.
-Love the one you are with.

I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season, in whatever forms and spiritual natures that you celebrate.

... I'm heading back into the "trenches" where ER is nothing like the TV show, never so carefully plotted as all that. My coffee is perked and I have, as Radar would say on M*A*S*H ... "CHOPPERS ... INCOMING."

(However, I am simultaneously cooking the Thanksgiving feast so I'll probably be in the ER with injuries related to juggling pumpkin torte, a half-thawed turkey and a keyboard!)

..originally pub. 2001/slightly reworked.