So you’re eating lunch and a code is called over the loudspeaker, and you get up and run back to the unit. It’s likely you’ll be needed, no matter where in the hospital the arrest occurred. The other people in the cafeteria watch you leave your bowl of soup sitting there, and they nod at you as you pass by. In the army of nurses, you wear four stars.

The pay is pretty good, too, especially for a single woman with no obligations—only child with no children, parents dead. I bought a little two-bedroom house a couple of blocks from the center of town. I bought a Porsche Carrera 911, too. Black, tan leather interior. Incredible sound system. The boys look when I pull up next to them; then look away. I beat them off the line, every time.

The problem with intensive care is that the patients usually can’t speak. They’re on respirators. Or they’re unconscious. Or they have such messed up chemistry that they’re confused. Or they stay just until they’re stabilized, and then they’re out of there and another train wreck comes in. That’s what the bad cases are called: train wrecks. It doesn’t mean what it sounds like. What it means is: right now, I can’t get close to you, you’re halfway to death. And anyway, I don’t have time.

So there’s no opportunity, in the unit, to sit at the side of the bed and shoot the breeze with patients. To get to know them. To admire pictures of their children, to style their hair, to slowly help them eat. Not that many of them eat. Tubes. I know a nurse who works in the unit precisely because the patients don’t eat. “I didn’t go to four years of nursing school to load mashed potatoes onto a fork,” she says. But I like feeding people. It doesn’t feel demeaning. It feels like high privilege.