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for both of us. I was immature and had no idea what to expect. It was a stupid thing to get married and then go off to medical school. I was never home, and even when I was, I wasn’t. The bottom line is that it turned out to be a crappy deal for her, and I take responsibility for the failure. I didn’t have another healthy marriage to model mine on, and that just compounded the problem. The marriage lasted eight months before we divorced.
    When I entered LSU medical school, the Vietnam conflict was in full swing, and high school classmates started coming home in body bags. I fully anticipated going into the military during my internship at Lafayette Charity Hospital, but as was to become the norm in my life, fate intervened and the war ended.
    So I got married. Again. We ended up in the picturesque north Louisiana town of Colfax. Hooker’s Café served great home-cooked food. Everyone knew everyone. And the folks were nice, though the money and the hours were horrible. I was paid with fish, deer meat, fresh vegetables—which I respected, but I would have preferred cash. Most of the folks were poor but proud. The closest hospital was in Alexandria, thirty miles away.
    I was in over my head. They needed a seasoned physician, not a tenderfoot just out of med school. I think I would have self-destructed had I stayed there any longer.
    Over the next year or so I investigated several accidental deaths, one open-and-shut homicide, and two suicides. There were also a few natural deaths—no mysteries.
    Being a GP in a rural town wasn’t working out, for my wife or me. My wife was from Baton Rouge, and when an offer to work there as an emergency room physician came my way, it seemed awfully attractive. The year was 1976, and at the ripe age of twenty-eight, I escaped with her to the “big city.”

“RED STICK”
    In French, Baton Rouge means “red stick,” and some say the place was named for the giant cypress tree where the settlement was located. Darker theories hold that it was named for the blood of an Indian massacre at the spot. Most folks just figure it was a skinning post. Take your pick. I joined an emergency physician’s group there in late 1976.
    The emergency room life was a frenzied, high-stakes test of wits and adrenaline, and I took to it right away. I was based at Baton Rouge General, one of the two hospitals in town. Though it is now in a bit of decline, I remember the floors were always clean and shined—so much so that I slipped one time when I was running to answer a code 14—cardiac arrest. Those were the “good old days,” when there was no ER specialty and we covered emergencies in the whole hospital.
    The place felt like home. The brave nurses I had the privilege to work with were always trying to make things better, despite rowdy drunks and violent PCP addicts. The action was quick and it was most rewarding to save someone. What kept me and others juiced was the element of suspense: What would be coming through the door next—an MVA (motor vehicle accident), a GSW (gunshot wound), or a stabbing? In retrospect, I think we were all adrenaline junkies. We not only liked to win, but we took defeat personally. Defeat, whether by natural or unnatural causes, was unacceptable. That attitude of perfectionism took its toll on all of us. There was no such animal as “critical incident debriefings” or Employee Assistance Programs in the late 1970s. We were on our own down there.
    When we saved a life, there was jubilation. When we lost, we simply drifted away from the deceased and never really processed it from an emotional perspective. Some of us would drink over it later at the nearby Fleur de Lys Lounge. The ER also proved to be a good training ground for exposure to the criminal elements in the city. Those folks just tend to get beat up and shot—a lot. We also handled drownings, child abuse, accidents, motor vehicle crashes, and