CHEESEBURGER FLAVORED BREAD.

November 09, 2006

I wrote “Cheeseburger-Flavored Bread” after a stretch of shifts that blurred together like a fever dream of bad smells and worse decisions. I was somewhere between burned out and numb, trying to hold onto a thread of humor before the job stripped it away completely.

The night that inspired it wasn’t even remarkable by medic standards. Just another low-income apartment, just another "sick person" call that turned out to be about twenty different things all at once—mental illness, poverty, isolation, and the unmistakable scent of government cheese and regret.

The guy had a loaf of white bread soaked in hamburger grease. He looked me dead in the eye and called it a cheeseburger. Said it with conviction, like he was proud of it. Like I should thank him for sharing that moment of culinary genius.

And I remember standing there thinking: This isn’t in the protocols. There’s no checklist for this kind of misery. No training on how to keep a straight face when someone offers you a slice of despair-drenched Wonder Bread and calls it dinner.

I wasn’t laughing at him. Not really. I was laughing because if I didn’t, something inside me was going to break.

When I sat down to write that night, I didn’t do it for clicks or catharsis—I did it because I needed to remind myself that this job, for all its chaos and cruelty, still had moments of absurd humanity that were too ridiculous not to remember. Writing it down made it real. It gave it shape. It let me own the madness, instead of the other way around.

That post wasn’t just about the guy or the bread. It was about the little ways people try to hang onto their dignity—how sometimes all they’ve got left is a soggy sandwich and a story.

And me? I wrote it down because it was the only way I knew how to carry it.