Texts from my mother

Note, my mom gave me permission to write this article. She asked that I remove any identifying detail about her or the patients. Originally published in The Sheet.

My favorite texts are the ones I get from my mom. These are the ones in the family group chat that start with “okay crazy shift so far,” then divulges details like “we are down a room/patient used meth in this room,” then photo evidence of said blockaded room.

My mom is an emergency room physician. She wears her green scrub pants backwards, with the tie tucked out, because that’s how she’s always done it. Out of the two of us, she’s the smarter, more organized, more hard-working one. She’s also the best story teller I know. For as long as I can remember, she’s wanted me to write her book.

When I was a kid, she’d come home from work with the juiciest tid-bits: a religious guy with a wife and four kids came in with a squash stuck up his you-know-where (his second vegetable induced hospitalization), a college student who tried to do you-know-what with a long-nosed vacuum cleaner, a 32 year old woman who insisted she wasn’t hallucinating, she really could teleport! Unreal.

Last week, she sent us this:

Old Guy comes in talking

We immediately make the correct diagnosis. He has a ruptured abdominal aneurysm.

We transfuse blood

He’s doing pretty well

Surgeon (clearly with some type of Asperger’s) comes down and tells the patient you’re gonna die maybe the next 15 minutes or maybe the next two hours

And walks out of the room and doesn’t do surgery

And the patient dies about an hour later

Super traumatic because patient walked in talking.

OK now for the funny case

Patient calls from their cabin

And says that there were 20 people in the cabin aged 2 to 70

The Family bought a new slushy maker

And they made slushies all weekend

When they went to clean out the slushy maker

They found a bat

Kind of ground up

But still clearly a bat

So all 20 people need to get the rabies series

At least until the autopsy of the bat comes back

I’ve never heard of anyone drinking bat slushies

Super gross.

“Ulla, honey, you really should write this down. I think this would be big for us,” she’d say at the dinner table. She always claimed I was a better writer than her. A flat-out lie. If iPhone texts count as literature, she’s prolific. I’m jealous. I’ll never be armed with her thumbs and life-time supply of the best gossip. Her texts always come in the same, irreplicable prose poem format. I could never do what she does.

This week, I asked Lunch if I could write a piece about her texts. He obliged. I’ll let her take the reins from here.

Currently, I would find it very difficult to retire from the emergency room just for the entertainment value itself

My first patient of my day is an old guy who is dressed somewhat unusually in that he has a bandana around his chin and a bandana on top of his head and ball cap

I asked him what he was wearing and he replied “not everybody got what they wanted for Christmas. This is my disguise so people will stop thinking of Santa Claus.”

Granted he does kinda look like Santa

He also has an elaborate contraption about 18” x 18” with multiple different sort of working things in it and says that it’s his music box and he plucks out different things and strums hums and sings 😊

He’s getting admitted to the psych ward ❤️

She texted this on January 19, 2025.

I can’t blame her for not wanting to retire. Another from December 22, 2023:

Patient dropped his radioactive urine on the floor

No one is allowed in that room for a week

Oddly, they sent the patient home in an Uber 😬

Merry almost Christmas. No explanation as to how the urine became radioactive.

Many of my mother’s most genius messages involve meth and the inappropriate use of a body part, as seen on August 15, 2022.

OK so sometimes I still get caught off guard by patients

My psych patient on meth is masturbating

Not OK to watch people do that.

On September 27, 2021, her psych patient drank his own urine.

Sometimes her messages are more confusing, like the one from that same September day.

“OK so I’m about to experience some of the old joy

500 pound person on the way in

Getting prepped because the patient is a hoarder and the ammonia levels were so high in the house that they had to get the hazmat team to soak down the house

So I’m gonna wear the hazmat suit to care for this patient

Making me giggle just a little.

My dad responded: “Looks like patient gowns, not hazmat suits”

“Yup,” mom said.

The pair of texts from her that I hold nearest and dearest came to me in May. I couldn’t stop showing them to everyone I knew.

OK, crazy story today

I took care of this patient who came in on methamphetamines and had a spit hood on cause he was just such a tool

I gave him some drugs to knock him out for a couple hours

Signed him out to a partner

Who discharged several hours later and he was sober

Patient went home, shot both his parents, and then the police killed him 😬

Fucking weird job I have

A spit hood is something physicians use when their patients are literally spitting too much. I didn’t know what it was either.

A few days later.

OK, my weird patient encounter of the day

Old man is having trouble forgiving himself

Because he arrested Ted Bundy

And then let him go

And he was known to have killed six people after that 😬

Brutal. Awful. Harrowing. And somehow, hilarious, hopeful. My mother was allowing the man to be forgiven.

After I received these last two, I called her. She told me she was okay. She was just grateful to have a space like the Libre family group chat to express herself.

The brilliance of my mother’s texts lies in her ability to convey the details. She’s clear, concise. There’s no added superfluous language; no more details than her reader needs to know. She’s an expert at stripping the story down to its bones and crawling inside.

These are skills I am still learning. It’s easy for me to get caught up in chasing the pretty sentences. I struggle with precision. I want to make my writing beautiful, when sometimes, all I can do is let it breathe, like my mother does.

The apple never falls far. Maybe it’s time to roll back to the tree.