Dr. Brian Goldman

So, of course, we have patient privacy and confidentiality.

And so I'm not going to violate that confidentiality without permission of the patient.

The stories that I'm telling are uber realistic, but they're composites of people I've seen over the years, clinical scenarios, clinical situations that I've seen over the years.

The decision making that I went through was that I wanted to paint a picture of what we're up against.

So when I tell the story of Molly in the first chapter of the book, and I don't want to be a spoiler, I want you to read the book.

What I'm trying to do is paint a picture of an ultra busy waiting room.

where there could be tens of patients, there could be 30, 40, 50 patients.

I have spoken to triage nurses.

I recently spoke to a couple of triage nurses in Edmonton who have had, if you can believe this, I mean, it's hard to make an impression with numbers, but they've seen 120 souls, 120 patients waiting to be brought in, seated in the waiting room.

And when you it's unfathomable, that's that is for many emergency departments, well more than 24 hours worth of patients all seated in the waiting room.

And, you know, there's a potential for nothing to be happening with any of those patients other than the most critically ill patients who are brought in as quick as they can be brought in.

And the triage nurses are watching them, not knowing what's happening inside them.

It's often not the people who are shouting, help me, help me, or a loved one saying, help him, help my mom, help my dad, which we hear those plaintiff cries all day long and all night long.

it's often the quiet ones that are smoldering along with abdominal pain from, for instance, an abdominal aortic aneurysm, like a blowout tire in the big artery that goes to the middle of their belly.

And if it blows, they can die.

They can die within minutes.

If they have a twisted bowel, which has cut off its blood supply, then you can have somebody going from

A bowel blockage caused by scar tissue that you can easily fix into somebody who you take to the operating room who has 10 or 20 feet of dead bowel and they're not going to survive.

Or they crash and have a cardiac arrest in the waiting room.

And so what I wanted in choosing the kinds of stories that I told, I wanted to show that