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I’m reading Ray Charle’s autobiography. It’s nothing the IntellectualElite would probably have on their book list, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t somehow interesting. Then again, we aren’t all in the television audience.

Before reality television, people had this same fascination with other people’s lives, they just had to read about it. Autobiographies and biographies were the ways we looked into other peoples’ lives. We used to learn through first person or second person, but now we are oddly satisfied with third person.

And that should come as odd. It’s the worst view, yet i tseems we feel the most justified with it. Pause for one honest second and realize the downside to a third-person viewpoint. Instead of clouding the truth of a person’s life with his/her bias, or in the second-person viewpoint where someone has taken time to really study the matter, we suddenly put our own ability to judge a situation as paramount to either.
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I’ve noticed something about the way people talk about death. It forces us to become metaphysical and philosophical. Some become crazed or paranoid while others show a cool indifference, but I’m not worried about the various facades. Actually, I’m not worried at all. So why not speak frankly?

Last week, while I attended to my patient through a harmless sleep study, Scott, from Respiratory stopped in to chat. (For those not in the health profession, in between saving lives, filling out charts and cleaning up some odd bodily fluid, there is a lot of hanging out). A fellow technician asked where he’d just been.

He’d just finished up a code blue on an infant. I’ll save a dramatic story.
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