Please Stop Asking for My Craziest Story

It’s usually within the first five minutes of meeting someone. They ask what I do, I say ER nurse, and there’s this little flicker in their eyes, and I know exactly what’s coming before they say it. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen. Every single time. I’ve stopped being surprised by it and I still don’t have a good answer, because the honest answer would require me to hand somebody’s worst night to a stranger at a party as entertainment, and I’m not willing to do that.

I get the impulse behind the question. ER work is strange from the outside, the pace of it, the range of what walks through the doors, and people are curious the way people are curious about anything they’ve only seen dramatized. I don’t think anyone asking it is trying to be callous. But there’s a gap between what they’re picturing when they ask, some wild anonymous anecdote with no weight attached, and what actually exists in my memory, which is a specific person on a specific night who trusted the room to take care of them and had no idea they’d become party conversation years later.

So I give the boring answer. I say something like, it’s mostly waiting punctuated by moments that matter, which is true and also successfully tells them nothing, and most people take the hint and change the subject. A few push, and I’ve gotten better over the years at just holding the boundary without making it a whole thing, I say I don’t really tell stories from work, and leave it there.

Here’s the part that actually bothers me about the question though, more than the mild social awkwardness of dodging it. It assumes the job is a supply of content. That the value of what happens on a shift is in how well it retells later, at a dinner table, for a stranger’s entertainment. And I think that assumption is exactly backwards. The nights that actually mattered to me are the ones I could never tell you about in a way that would land the same, because the parts that made them matter aren’t the plot, they’re small and specific and belong to the person it happened to, not to me, and definitely not to whoever’s asking at a barbecue.

I write plenty on this blog about what I read and what I play, and every so often something from the job leaks in, a rough shift, a small ritual, the way this job shapes how I move through everything else. I think that’s a different thing than the craziest story question, and I try to be careful about the line. If you’re ever tempted to ask me, ask me what I’m reading instead. I promise that answer’s more interesting anyway.