Track 1, Side 1: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin

Life in the ER...starting off my journey with a bang

My dad taught me every epic journey deserves a great soundtrack. My PalliMed Mixtape is the story of my Palliative Medicine Fellowship year, told in 15 songs.

Communication Breakdown on Apple Music

I love starting a road trip mixtape high tempo.  Dad would approve. Let’s put the pedal to the metal and get some miles under our belts before the sun comes up! 

Jimmy Page’s propulsive, muscly, guitar riff to open this rock n’ roll classic echoes my 13 years working in the ER.  Better bring the energy to every shift.  You’ll need it.  The patients will keep coming like Page’s pulsatile guitar chords.  The urgency of your every move is real.  

I don’t know what it is I like about you, but I like it a lot

That’s how I felt about the ER.  I liked it a lot. It was really freaking fun.  Fantastic work.  There was nothing better than a great save.  I walked into work with swagger, with my bandmates at my side, ready for anything that might come at us.  Not today, Death!  Not in my ER! 

It was rock n’ roll medicine, and we rocked hard—bringing hearts back to life, resetting exposed and broken bones, putting in breathing tubes just before throats closed up. High adrenaline stuff! And just like leaving a great concert, it would regularly take hours once home to come down off the rush of it all after each shift. 

As much as I loved it all, at some point it got to me.  The frenetic pace, the rushed conversations, the knife’s-edge moment-to-moment life-and-death decisions, the unending flow of patients, the tyranny of the urgent—all of it left me feeling frayed and on edge.  I left some shifts feeling like the cover image of this Led Zeppelin album—the Hindenburg airship bursting into flames.

Communication breakdown, it’s always the same / Havin’ a nervous breakdown, drive me insane

I started desiring something very different in medicine.  I began looking for how I could spend my time diving deeper with patients, slowing down, walking alongside patients with serious illness for longer than just the few minutes I had them in the ER.  The work my old ER bandmates are still doing is so important—mad respect for you, friends. But as the shifts stacked up, I began to wonder if there might be another space for me in the world of healthcare…

***Honorable mention for Track 1 on my mixtape: The Ramone’s I Wanna Be Sedated, Fugazi’s Waiting Room, Joe Diffie’s Prop Me Up Beside The Jukebox If I Die, Metallica’s Ride The Lightning, and of course, The Clash’s Should I Stay Or Should I Go.

Tell me Crash Cart Campfire friends:

• What song would kick off your road trip?

• Has your work ever left you feeling like the Hindenburg bursting into flames?

• What’s on your mixtape?