A Wisbech Christmas — Michael Paterson

Sam felt fortunate that the police would notify the next of kin.Weekend night shift was a mixed bag. The police would always bring in a few college students who had tried to poison themselves with alcohol. She rarely saw the same students twice, a stomach pump seemed to make an impression on even the most inebriated young person. Then there were the traffic accidents. There were over twenty thousand students at the various centers of higher education in a metropolitan area that contained about two-hundred thousand, which meant that a disproportionate number of the Patients that passed through her emergency department were young and careless, reckless or stupid. There was a joke about rednecks which went something like this, 'What's a rednecks last words? 'Hey Bubba, hold my beer and watch this!' Well in Wisbech the redneck would be replaced by a college student, with the same tragic results.Ah, to be young again. She was only thirty but at three-thirty in the morning, and after hours of frantic surgery, she felt like ninety. Even as deputy chief of the Emergency Care Center she had to pull her weight and that meant she was on rotation once a month for a week of nights.