Four Modes of Writing: Blink

Four Modes of Writing: Blink

It was a routine call. My men and I grabbed our fire gear and were in the truck within 40 seconds. We raced to the small one story house where a fire had broken out. I could feel my adrenaline taking over my body as I raced towards the house with one of the hoses. It weights a ton however my body hardly seems to notice its weight as I sprint into the flames. Kitchen fires are relatively standard to distinguish, but the overwhelming excitement and urgency of a fire never lets my job become anything other than dangerously dramatic. We doused the entire kitchen, water spraying from left right, but nothing happened to the flames. They continued to boil the room to an unprecedented heat as they feverishly tried to steal all the oxygen in the room before us. My men were trained well and they never dropped their hoses or even considered abandoning their mission, however panic was rapidly consuming me. This was my team and it was my responsibility to keep them safe even in the most dangerous of fires. Then it hit me- like a loaded semi-truck striking incoming traffic on the highway- we needed to evacuate that building immediately. "Let's get out, now!" I wailed at the top of my lungs. Mere seconds after my team and I had stepped out of the building, the floor of the house collapsed. What we had been treating as a simple routine kitchen fire was actually a complex inferno of flames that had generated from the basement. It was a ruthless fire and it would never stop burning until it had consumed the entire house and everything in it, and it definitely would not have hesitated at the grotesque thought of taking us down with it.

Every hospital should be using Goldman's heart attack decision tree when trying to decide how to diagnose and treat someone who claims they are having a heart attack. Heart attacks are one of the most difficult medical conditions to diagnose due to the lack of a definitive test you can run that will say with certainty if someone is suffering from one or not. There are dozens of factors that go into the decision and it can be difficult for a doctor to diagnose. Typically they error on the side of caution and admit almost everyone to the hospital, just to make sure they don't send someone home that is actually having a heart attack. However this wastes doctors' precious time and the hospital's resources. Hospitals could save money each and every day by simply teaching their doctors how to use the decision making tree. It is very simple and contains just three questions that each branch off toward a specific treatment for the particular patient being examined. Lee Goldman was a math mathematician who spent years studying every aspect of heart attacks until he finally reached this algorithm. Doctors are resistant to use it simply because it feels too easy- they aren't getting paid the big bucks to read a page and follow a