It always starts the same way. You are halfway through a night shift. The calls have finally spaced themselves out. Your coffee is cold. Everyone in the bay is starting to relax just a little bit. Then someone, usually a new hire or an optimistic fool, leans back and says it.
“It’s been quiet tonight.”
Everything stops for a second. Someone groans. Someone knocks on wood. Someone else grabs their radio like it is a holy relic. Not long after, the tones drop or the phone rings or the stretcher starts moving for no reason at all. Just like that, the curse begins.
We laugh about it. We blame the Q-word or the full moon or the new guy’s haircut. But underneath the sarcasm, there is a shared belief that what we say might actually jinx the shift. The strange part is that the people who believe this are usually the smartest people I know.
We are trained to be skeptical. We question assumptions and look for evidence. We lean on data for everything. Yet we still won’t wash the truck too early. We won’t sit down before a call. We definitely won’t say that word. Clearly something else is going on here.
I have been chewing on that for a while. I started asking around. I talked to medics I trust and some I only tolerate. I heard about death omens and lucky socks and people who swear they can feel a call in their gut before it comes. And always in three’s. I rolled my eyes at some of it. Eventually I realized that superstition in this job isn’t about believing in magic. It is about working in a world where bad things happen for no clear reason. You still have to walk into the next house like everything makes sense.
Our brains are wired to look for patterns. We connect things that happen close together and assume one caused the other. When a bad call follows the word “quiet,” we build a story out of it. It isn’t logical. It just feels better to believe the world has rules, even stupid ones, than to accept that terrible things just happen.
This job trains you to look for patterns everywhere. You walk into a room and look for the problem before anyone says a word. You watch the way someone sits or the way they look at you. After a few years, you start trying to see what is coming before it gets there. We connect these dots because we are used to patterns meaning something.
In an unpredictable job, superstition becomes a kind of structure. We cannot control what the next call will be, so we control what we can. We control our routines and our language and our little rituals. It gives shape to the mess. It makes the job feel like it follows rules even when it doesn’t.
Sometimes it gives us somewhere to put the blame. This job quietly convinces you that you are supposed to catch everything before it gets bad. When something still goes wrong, that weight has to land somewhere. We let it land on the moon or the new guy instead of letting it land on ourselves every single time.
Sometimes you need to believe the universe is screwing with you. The alternative is that you missed something. That kind of guilt does not lift easily.
There is culture in it too. Superstition is part of our shared language. When we warn a new medic not to say the word, we are half joking and half checking if they understand the rhythm of this job. Are they one of us yet? Do they get how strange this work is? These are not just beliefs. They are how we recognize each other.
I have a supervisor who teases us with that word. He grins when he says it because he knows exactly what it does to the crew. He isn’t trying to curse the shift. He is just reminding us that we are all in on the same strange joke. Somehow that matters more than it should.
But belief can turn into bias. That is where it stops being funny. I have heard medics talk about the full moon and then treat the next patient like the moon already decided who they were going to be. That is the danger. Superstition starts as a joke, but it can become a lens. Once you are looking through it, everything starts to look the same.
The research says full moons do not actually change anything. Science is not on our side here. But superstition was never about being right. It is about feeling prepared. It is about feeling like the nonsense has a pattern.
We know better, but we still knock on wood. We still flinch when someone says the word. Knowing and feeling are not the same thing.
Maybe the most dangerous belief isn’t in full moons or cursed shifts. Maybe it is thinking we are too rational to fall for anything at all.
I will still wince when someone says it. I will still sip my cold coffee and wait for the tones. When they drop, I will remember what actually matters. The patient is in front of us. The things we know are real. The things we can prove.
If the next call is a nightmare, I will blame the moon for a minute. Then I will get out of the truck and go to work.
Notes & References
- Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies—How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (New York: Times Books, 2011).
- Ivan Kelly, James Rotton, and Roger Culver, “The Moon Was Full and Nothing Happened: A Review of Studies on the Moon and Human Behavior,” Psychological Bulletin 97, no. 2 (1985): 286–306.
- A. Taher, S. Samreen, and M. Firdosi, “Superstition in Health Beliefs: Concept, Influence and Implications,” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 9, no. 9 (2020): 4762–66.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
Ghosts of the Navigator 