I walked out of my first 30-hour workday with the kind of spring in my step you can only get from having stuck your hands into a dying man's chest to pump his heart for him, pulling back half a man's abdomen to watch your teammates remove yards upon yards of dead bowel, and sowing up the deep cuts of two kids that are going to wear the quality of my work as a scar on their chest forever. OK maybe there are other things to give you that spring in your step, but those 30 hours really topped the list of all-nighters I've had, whether all night dancing in a warehouse, or even in the flat desert at Burning Man. Definitely beats spending the night in the library...

I go back on call tomorrow at 5:30AM to come home around noon the next day. During these same hours, 20 of my closest friends will be partying their collective asses off in a mid-size town of 40,000 party-goers and engineers in the Black Rock Desert and for the first time since I started going to the festival 7 years ago, Burning Man is not the only place I want to be during this week of the year. I'll do my best to write what happens...