The emergency room is one of the few places left in the world where ego simply cannot survive. The moment those doors open, the normal rules of social hierarchy dissolve completely. It does not matter who you know, what you drive, or how loudly you can make a scene. A triage nurse deciding who lives and who waits is doing the most important job in the building, and everything can change in a matter of seconds.
Your place in that chaos is determined by one thing only, and it is not your shoes. One Karen found that out the hard way on a very busy Monday in a level one trauma centre, when she decided that her mother’s gallstones outranked a man who was minutes from flatlining in the stretcher next to her. The nurse did not stop and the CEO that Karen kept threatening to call eventually did show up. It did not go the way she planned.
