Neil and I met at St. Louis University Hospital in the Neurosurgical ICU sometime in May, 2009. It was about 2AM and I called him to deal with some sort of issue with my patient. --That's what we usually tell people anyway.
We do not actually agree on the exact moment that we met. I seem to think that I already knew him at that moment. Perhaps, I had noticed him rounding before that. I do remember thinking he was crazy cute and wanting to get to know him better.
There was one instance after we met, when he was on the other side of a window and I was sitting with another nurse. She was asking me who he was and I pretended I didn't really know. She asked me if I knew what his name was while she was trying to read his notoriously bad handwriting. I gave her the exact spelling, while trying not to sound like I knew exactly how to spell it and had maybe checked into him already! She asked what I thought his nationality was and all I could think was that he could probably hear us and I'm sure my face was so red.
We chatted a bit on the long nights in the ICU when Neil would "take a break" that happened to be two floors below his call room and right between my patients' rooms. We instantly found we had a ton of things in common. One day we found ourselves alone- usually we were joined by other nurses, and he asked me if I would like to go out sometime and have a drink. I didn't want to sound like I had been waiting for him to ask me, so I gave it a good pause for dramatic affect and said, "um... ok."
