Monthly Archives: April 2022

April 26th marked the two year anniversary of Lorna Breen’s death. It was a bit of an emotional day in my ER, at least for me. I made a point of taking a moment of rememberance with the few people left who knew her.

For many years, there was very little turnover in my ER. COVID changed all that – two years after her death, there are very few doctors and nurses left, which makes the whole thing even more surreal. Staff is either pre-COVID or post-COVID.

It’s weird.

The trauma of what happened in March and April of 2020 was so great it caused a mass exodus. It’s impossible to talk to anyone who didn’t work through it about that time, so I shut up and keep my feelings to myself.

But yesterday, in the middle of the usual shitstorm that is the ER, a few of us met in the trauma room and told stories about our experiences with her. It felt good. Healing, actually.

What exactly do you call the relationship you have with the people you work with? If you’re an ER doc or nurse, your shifts are twelve and a half hours long in a chaotic environment filled with life and death scenarios. It’s your job to keep people alive, often failing despite your best efforts.

One of the ways you get through it is by developing close relationships with the people you work with based on respect and trust.

Can you trust the judgement of the person next to you? Will they do the right thing? Do they even know what the right thing is?

Once the shift is over, for the most part, you don’t see each other after work, yet you spend more time with them than you do with your spouse or partner. It’s not really a personal relationship, yet somehow it is. When one of them dies, you take it hard.

So RIP Lorna. You are gone, but for those whose lives you touched, you’ll never be forgotten.

Filmed in 1976, this unclassifiable Canadian film directed by Nicolas Gessner features yet another inexplicable performance by 14-year-old Jodie Foster in a year in which she starred in six feature films. Yeah, this was the year she made Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and the Walt Disney production Freaky Friday. Let’s not forget Alan Parker’s directorial debut Bugsy Malone. Plus a French film and yet another one from Canada.

There’s something a little scary about a child who can play the lead in a movie like this — she is in virtually every scene, playing opposite adult actors, most notably Martin Sheen in what is without a doubt one of the creepiest depictions of a child molester I’ve ever seen. Guaranteed to make your skin crawl, but of course, he’s no match for Jodie.

It’s impossible to look away from her, she just radiates a formidable intelligence that somehow makes the story believable. Quiet, still, and unsettling, this is just a great, unsung movie that, once seen, will not be forgotten. Her nascent sexuality, caught between childhood and who she would become as an adult, is rendered meaningless in a richly layered performance.

The closing credits hold a close-up shot of her face for minutes — there is no acting here — whoever it is you are watching, you believe every goddamn minute of it.

Haunting and deeply disturbing. From a 14-year-old who never took an acting lesson.

There’s just no explanation for that.

I’m sure I’ve made this observation before, but I think it’s worth revisiting.

The only way we can see the world is through the lens of our experience and understanding. Seems obvious, right?

Well hold on – not so fast.

Because if this is true, then it also must be true that we are, by definition, unable to see the world through the eyes of others.

Fiction, movies, and other forms of story telling gives us a glimpse of other perspectives, if we can suspend disbelief.

But if someone else’s actions seem unbelievable to you, it’s only because you’re not seeing the world through their eyes.

I have a long list of provocative ideas for fiction that excite me. Well, excite might be the wrong word.

On closer inspection, I realize that where I would go with what is already a rather dark idea is somewhere no sane person would find entertaining at all.

Don’t. Go. There.