Field notes: 50 is not the new 40.

Acting your age sounds boring. It's not. You just didn't get what [insert your age here] would really be like.

Cause and effect. As an ER doctor, I typically see the latter, though generally the former isn’t too hard to suss out.

Car accident? Somebody was drinking or texting.

Heart attack? Years of risk factors caught up.

Lately, I’ve had a few unexpectedly similar cases where the effects were not uniform, though the causes were. One patient had knee pain. Another had back pain. More recently, I had a guy who kept nearly passing out.

Arguably, the causes of these vastly different ER presentations were the same…