I can’t help being superstitious, because I have anxiety. They go together. When you’re anxious, it seems as if worrying counts as an action, and it seems as if any little habits you pick up may also help. So I’m a superstitious worrier. I’m starting to realize in my old age, however, that in the game of superstition vs. inevitability, inevitability can provide a certain amount of freedom.

In addition to being intrinsically anxious, I am also a nurse, and I have largely worked in either an emergency room or places where I am on call a lot. I feel viscerally angry when anyone says quiet, even though I haven’t been in an ER for a while now. If someone speaks the name of a patient who might be termed a frequent flier, I shush them and ask what is wrong with them.

I am in good company with these types of things. If you don’t believe me, ask your nearest nurse who the patient is that they dread seeing (there is always one) and then say, “It’s been pretty quiet for you lately. I wonder what happened to [that patient’s name].” She will beat you to a bloody pulp. (I realize that no nurse would break patient privacy in this way, but stay with me. It’s a thought experiment. Don’t actually do this to a nurse, because just saying quiet may get you hit.)

There are corollaries in any field. In corrections, “No one has tried to hang themselves for a while” is one. In psych, “No one has needed a PRN yet today” will do it. In hospice, “none of my people has died recently” will cause my boss to threaten to stab me with a fork, and hospice call is a totally different monster. Hospice call can destroy your life. It turns a day job into day-and-night job, and if you draw the weekend call straw, it turns a work week into working 12 days in a row straight. If anything could ever make anyone superstitious, that would.

I have to add that I nearly didn’t start this post for another 20 minutes because that is how long was left until I was off call, but I did, to flout superstition, and behold! I got a call during the last 10 minutes. Inevitability or superstition: which applied? My boyfriend gets in trouble on a regular basis for saying, “I hope you have a slow night,” when I’m on call. Well, then I’m doomed to making 8 trips out into the country and getting no sleep.

I have another possibly less common rituals to stave off calls. I don’t take my socks off when I change out of my scrubs (because them I’m still “dressed for work” and ready to go). I try not to leave the house (because the universe may note that I have found something to do and I will get called at a maximally inconvenient time and place). I try to avoid mulling over all the things I could possibly get called on (because, again, this may somehow bring those things to the attention of the universe). I spend a lot of mental energy trying to play possum and pull the wool over the eyes of the powers that be.

And, of course, I announce to all and sundry that I expect a busy night or weekend and will most likely be up all night and working 16 hour days. “I guess,” I’ll announce gloomily, “I’ll go take a nap before I get called out.” Somehow this should trick the powers that be into a false sense of preparedness on my part, important because calls typically arrive at the least opportune moment — when I’m in that stage of wonderful early sleep that I can never return to, at 3 AM when I won’t have time to go back to sleep, when I’m one edge of my geographical boundary and then have to go all the way to the other edge.

Many of these things have an unnerving propensity to seem to work. That’s why I, and others, do them. But as I said to begin with, inevitability also takes over, and I feel my adherence to these little rules slipping, as evidenced by my starting this post when I was still on call despite the fact that it would remind the universe that I was ON call (which it did, and I got called).

Things will happen, or not happen, regardless of what I think or do.

At first blush, that’s pretty scary. It makes it seem as if I have no control, and that is because I don’t. On further exploration, though, it is freeing. It frees me from the crushing responsibility of influencing universal action through my own thoughts and actions: that can’t possibly work, and it can be exhausting. Worrying and trying to force my thoughts and actions down one path to avoid a certain outcome is often more taxing than it would be just relax and then go on the damn call.