This is a picture I did not take

of a young woman stifling a yawn, standing in a chaotic room within the Red Zone of a Level 1 Trauma Center on a hot Saturday night in the middle of June, hallways filled with a dire backlog of gurneys; doctors, nurses, firemen and police darting through the queue of stretchers in a choreography of import and efficiency, helicopter pilots arriving in blue jumpsuits, delivering bodies both bent and broken from the roof's heliport, all while a young woman entering her senior year of high school, who thought she might be interested in becoming a med student but wasn't really sure, and because of this interest volunteered to help out at the Trauma Center on a hot June night, stood at the end of the bed of a man who'd been shot in the face and was moaning in pain, while doctors attented to his vitals and tried to solve the wound created by a bullet that "came out of the woods" and caused his left jaw to secede from his right, and while the young woman stood there facing his moans and the doctors and the blood and his broken face, and while the intercom repeated calls for nurses STAT and preparations were made to operate, the man's friends slipped outside to "smoke a blunt" to calm their nerves, and the young woman stood with her back against the wall, observing the scene in front of her, and quickly stifled the smallest yawn with the back of her hand.