Superstition

Here we are, day ten of NaBloPoMo, and I'm 10 for 10.
I hope I don't jinx myself by saying that!

Yeah.
EMS (and fire service) folks tend to be a little superstitious about some things.

The most common, and most obvious one has to do with saying the "Q" word. If anyone ever suggests things are quiet, two things will happen almost immediately. The first is that any coworkers who heard it will tell the person to hush their mouth, or otherwise give them crap- and the second is that the calls will start coming.

Logically and rationally, there is no way that such superstitions have any truth to them.

Anecdotally, they sure seem to!

I've lost count of the number of times someone has mentioned not having had a particular type of call, and we get one.

The biggest example of this happened a couple of years ago, when we were over at a neighboring department's spaghetti dinner, and sat around chatting with friends there for a while. One of the friends was someone I'd taken a class with early on, and we were comparing the different types of things we had seen. Someone in our group mentioned that we hadn't had a major trauma...

and a couple of hours later, there we were, by the side of the road, two critical patients, two helicopters.

It got our attention.

Since then, we have learned to be very careful.

We still slip up from time to time, and mention the weather and road conditions, sure to provide us with someone in a ditch. Or we'll wonder how a particular patient is doing, and then get "invited" to go see them.

Our new plan is to start being careful about the wording of our comments.

You know, we haven't had an easy, uncomplicated delivery of a healthy, full term baby lately...

Yep. We've been saying that. And crossing our fingers, hoping for the chance.

Got robbed of one today, it turns out.
A friend just down the way- in our district!- delivered his own healthy baby girl this afternoon. As we all know, it was really his wife who did all the work- but he got to catch.  They didn't quite make it to the hospital, as had been their plan.

Close. So close.
We almost made it.
We just need to work on that careful wording a little more, tweak it just right, and surely...