The button is a reminder that pain should be routinely assessed just as temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure are. At that hour, the unit is bustling. Reaching left and right, their hands fly on keyboards and phones. Nurses walk briskly up and down the halls and disappear into rooms to brightly encourage patients to greet the day. The thick soles of their white shoes are already bouncing in anticipation of miles yet to travel.
Doctors sit before computer screens reviewing test results or writing in charts.
As they process information, make plans and prescribe, they dictate quietly into phones. Periodically, everybody has questions for each other. Information crisscrosses this nerve center at a strangely muted decibel. There are sick patients close by. In his smooth knit shirt and creased khaki pants, a pager on one hip and a cellular phone on the other, Michael looks more relaxed than most of his more formally tailor colleagues.