I just had a long talk with the wife and 21-year old kid of a man who I saw come into the ER half an hour after he crashed his motorcycle on the freeway, who's been in a coma for the past 5 days. I saw the case come in and recorded the vitals as they dropped in the ER to the point where I had to walk out for a second because I was convinced the man was dying. Somehow they managed to bring him back, even though he had spinal fluid coming out of the ears and nose, a flail chest (where enough ribs are broken in two places to create a movable part of the rib cage), and a double femur fracture and compound tib/fib. We've been fixing the rest of him, but he's been virtually brain dead since then and all the doctors have been doing their best to save the man while also doing their best to avoid the wife who's been at his bedside most of the time. The man's stabilizing, and we're pretty sure he's not coming back.
Yesterday I saw the wife at the bedside and I had some free time, so I went in to say hi. She's been really nice this whole time, albeit in some kind of traumatic psychosis, and had apparently been living in the hospital for the past 4 days. All I did was tell her again, slowly, what's been going on and then I just sat their and nodded for the next half hour as she talked and talked about miracles and how she's felt death before but doesn't feel death now, and how she's fully aware of the worst case (and most likely) scenario but would really rather the doctors stop being so negative and let her believe in her miracles. I didn't think she'd have that kind of perspective on things. So I told her the good news, that we really don't know much about what's going on in the brain (I didn't tell her that the CT scan showed a probable brainstem infarct, giving him virtually no chance of recovering, after all the Radiology read was "probable").
The Chaplain came by a little while later and I got a chance to speak to him before he went into the patient's room to pray at the bedside for him, and it turns out he also felt strongly about letting the wife believe in her miracle. Still, he as he walked into the patient's room to pray for him, he told me he was more worried for the wife.
In other sad news, we were the trauma team to try to save the victim of a pedestrian who got hit by a van that was being chased by cops (see local news story, at http://cbs2.com/carchase/Chase.Crash.Pedestrian.2.809710.html).

Sure beats taking a single-use toothbrush out of the rectum of a 15-year old jouvenile hall horrifically suicidal kid who wanted to take the scalpel out of the resident's pocket to slit his wrists because Freddy, the voice in his head, told him to do so because sticking the toothbrush into his ass isn't killing him fast enough.

can't say it isn't interesting work...