An Anesthesiologist in the E.R.

My first trip to the emergency room was in August 1969. My 10th birthday was quickly approaching and school was going to start in about two weeks. The E.R. I visited was at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where my dad, A.H. “Buddy” Giesecke, Jr., M.D., worked. Not quite six years earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been taken there – but that’s another story. I had suffered a fracture of my right tibia and fibula in a bicycle accident, and my dad took me there to have a cast placed. The only thing I recall about that visit was seeing a gentlemen lying on a stretcher in the hallway. He had a sheet pulled up to his chest and that portion of the sheet over his abdomen was stained with blood. The man saw my dad and me and asked us for some water. Of course, my dad, understanding the risk...