"Night Shift Nightmare"

This article is conveniently titled "Night Shift Nightmare," which immediately sets
the tone for what is to come. It's about how dangerous it is to visit the emergency room
late at night. The exposition begins with a scenario involving a fifteen year old boy named
Lewis recovering from surgery to correct a birth defect in his chest. The author explains
that the condition is completely non-life threatening, and then mentions how smart and
academically successful he was. From these words alone the reader can infer that the
outcome of this kid's fate will be tragic. There is an undeniable sense of
foreshadowing and implied guilt towards hospitals, one of the few places most people
place their full trust in. Next follows the steady downfall of Lewis. He begins exhibiting
abnormal symtpoms such as high heart rate and low temerature at around two in the
morning. The condition worsens when the understaffed ER is unable to give him the
attention he deserves. The author says that "His eyes are hollow, his skin is pale, and
he's sweating cold buckets." The reader is suddenly filled with fear of what is to come.
Just before the outcome is revealed, however, the author throws a cliffhanger that reeks
of tension. Lewis's mother screams for help, and a doctor finally comes to aid. He
screams the boy's name, but his shouts fall on deaf ears.

The second section helps to add both venom and plausibility to the writer's
ranting diatribe against the ER. It relies on statistics, empirical observation, and cold
hard facts rather than anecdotal evidence. No longer constrained to the narrative
perspective, the passive pessism exhibited by the author in the first section suddenly
becomes, well, quite active. He begins with a recent study that discovered that babies
born late at night at sixteen percent more likely to die than those born in the daytime,
showing that people of all ages are in danger. He then shifts his criticism to the
erroneous nature of these medical skeleton crews, showing that in a review of
pharmaceutical and patient records, there were more medication errors made at night.
The most chilling bit of proof, however, is shown when the author shifts to the
perspective of a nurse, who explains that a number of patiens have actually called
911 in their hospital beds due to a lack of any medical attention whatsoever. By the
end of the second segment, any reconciliations the reader might have had initially
have probably been all but destroyed.

The author finally reverts back to Lewis's hospital predicament. The medical
staff is depicted as "frantically trying to stabilize him," and at this point most readers
are probably strapped to their chair in a state of frantic anticipation as to whether or
not he will survive. The attempt fails, and an autopsy shows that Lewis had bled to
death from an ulcer caused by an excessive amount of Toradal, a painkiller he was
given post-surgery. Had there been doctors present, Lewis would have probably
survived.

Overall, the author's tone is shaped by the subject matter itself; it's negative
in that the writer places full blame on the emergency rooms for the cause of so
many preventable deaths. Although there are several places in the article that make
effective use of diction, there really isn't a specific voice that can be attributed
to the author, except that the material is presented in a manner that is very
straightforward and to the point. The structure is interesting in that it is in an "ABA"
format. The first section is the beginning of a story, the second section concerns
itself with facts, observations, and evidence, and the last section is the continuation
and conclusion of the story.