I love RBTs. They are awesome. What are RBTs, you ask? OK, OK. Explanation forthcoming.

It’s tough to stay connected with your friends from residency. These are the people with whom you’ve shared sleepless nights and adult beverages at 8 a.m. after getting off a night shift and vented about annoying residents from consulting services. I am here to tell you that there is no better bond. Especially when you can continue to bond over the seriously goofy stuff we see every day. However, I am happy to say that because of RBTs, I’m still very close to my friends from residency. You should really look into getting some yourself.

RBTs, that is – not friends from residency. RBTs are Random Betsy Texts. Betsy is one of my best friends from residency who peppers me with occasional hilarity – and stupidity – from her tenure in the ED. Now, there are some things you should know about Betsy. She is just over 5 feet tall – like me – and no-nonsense, with a dry sense of humor. I sometimes wonder if people get that she’s being sarcastic when she’s trying to determine if they’ve conjured up some disease in an effort to get narcotics out of her.

One of my first RBTs: Working in triage today.: Had a patient bring a vacuum cleaner in with him. You can’t make this stuff up.

Me: What was he planning on doing with the vacuum cleaner?

RBT: Not sure. No one ever asked him. We only made sure he had it with him when he was leaving so that he wouldn’t have to come back to retrieve it.

This made me laugh until tears streamed down my face and I would need a week’s worth of cucumbers just to get rid of the puffiness.

A couple months later, my phone pinged and I burst out laughing at the text she’d sent.

“I just had a patient tell me he was allergic to Narcan.”

My response: “Too bad he won’t be conscious enough to tell anyone when they give it to him.”

More random awesomeness appears on my phone, signaling me with a fabulous ping. I may have to get a special ping just for these. Then I could have that wonderful Pavlovian response to them.

RBT: Why aren’t people embarrassed to come to the ED for constipation?

RBT: I had two people today tell me they had cancer so they could get narcotics.

RBT: Chapped lips?! Seriously, there is no triage code for that.

Now, one of my other best friends from residency, Cindy, heard about these occasional little gems I get, her response being, “I want some RBTs!”

She has totally gotten in on the game now, too. I suppose now I get RCTs, too. (That’s Random Cindy Texts, in case you weren’t following along.). Cindy is another no-nonsense gal, a Texan, and a mother of two. When she was 8 months pregnant with her son, she once told a patient, “Suck it up, Buttercup!”

While in college, she worked for a little while as a bartender.

Recently I was on a night shift when a picture popped up on my phone. I took a double take to find that Cindy had sent me a picture of a machete. (Yes, folks, a true-to-life, Romancing-the-Stone machete.) It’s Texas, I guess.

RCT: I just pulled this off a patient.

Apparently, their security guys didn’t do that great of a search. How did that get though the metal detector?

RCT: I just diagnosed miliary TB.

OK, that’s just awesome. Not usually on my differential.

RCT: Chief complaint: Assault. Hit in face with a chicken nugget.

Well, we’ve regressed from machetes to chicken nuggets as weapons. What kind of a society are we? It’s a good thing it wasn’t the sharp end of a crunchy fry.

For my part, I try to share all the interesting names I see. Recently, I had a Princezarriyon. Betsy said she was sure he’d be a future college professor.

I’m sure you all have seen the same weird stupidity day in and day out. But there’s something about seeing it coming across your phone out of nowhere that makes it that much more funny and enjoyable – oh, and tolerable.

I’m always looking forward to my next text, wondering what nonsense is going on in the world. It makes me feel not so alone in the night, knowing that someone else out there is sitting in the same seat, surveying the crowd, trying to sift out who is sick and who is not so sick.

Some nights, it seems like everyone is sick. Other nights, it seems like only people who are sick in the head would call the ambulance because a cough drop made their throat numb, and they thought they were having a stroke (true story). I mean, it’s a miracle these people survive childhood. Three million years ago, some prehistoric cat would have eaten them by now.

It’s really hard to do what we do. It’s overwhelming, frustrating, and gratifying, at the same time. But we do what we gotta to get through it all, and I, for one, need my steady diet of RBTs and RCTs to keep me going, seeing the next patient, saving them from their cough drops and themselves.

Dr. Lisa Bundy is an attending physician at ERMed, LLC, in Montgomery, Ala., and a former photojournalist, who not only sings in the car, but talks to herself, is addicted to diet drinks and shoes, and thinks emergency medicine is the greatest specialty.