After the shift

Twelve hours in emergency medicine and then I write. The logic of this is not obvious to most people I know. My therapist has recommended I try sleeping instead. I understand the recommendation. I've been an ER nurse at a hospital on the North Side for six years and the writing started as something I did to decompress, a notebook in the car before I drove home, a few sentences to put something somewhere other than inside my head. Then it got longer and started to have structure and became, reluctantly, fiction. The stories I write are not about hospitals. They are about the hours after, the way a person who has seen something at work carries it into an ordinary evening. A woman buying groceries at a 24-hour Walgreens at 7:45 in the morning, still in scrubs, who has just spent an hour with a family being told news. What she puts in the basket. What the cashier says. I am interested in the ordinary world as experienced by someone whose frame of reference has been recently and severely altered. I don't know what genre that is. I don't particularly care.