"Is there a doctor on board?" Me, standing up: "I'm a neurologist." Four of these. Every one of them has happened. SEND this to the one person who is all of them. "Is there a doctor on board?" Me, standing up: "I'm a neurologist." Flight attendant, still scanning the cabin: "...anyone else?" Night team: "Anything I should know?" Me: "Bed 12 is fine." Night team: "Fine how?" Me: "Fine in the way that has been fine for six hours and stops being fine at 3 a.m." Night team: "Why 3?" Me: "It is always 3." Visit over. Hand on the doorknob. Patient: "Oh — and sometimes my whole left side goes numb for an hour." That is the visit. Everything before it was the waiting room. Patient: "You told me eight hours.Same time every night. No screens." Me: "Correct." Patient: "Do YOU do that?" Me: "I am the sign." Me: "I am not the destination." Sleep hygiene counselling, delivered by a man who has not slept before midnight since high school.

EXPLAINED (ACCURACY-CHECKED)

(1) No medical claim — self-deprecating joke about neurology's limited usefulness in an acute in-flight emergency. Punches at ourselves. (2) Clinical deterioration is detected later during nights and off-hours; differences in staffing, monitoring and escalation thresholds underlie the well-described off-hours effect. The specific hour is clinician folklore layered on that real effect. (3) The 'doorknob' or 'oh by the way' phenomenon is a well-described consultation pattern in which the patient's most significant concern is raised at the end of the encounter; transient unilateral sensory symptoms are a presentation that warrants evaluation rather than reassurance. (4) Standard sleep hygiene counselling — consistent sleep-wake timing, adequate duration, limiting evening screen exposure — is routine, non-controversial advice given in neurology clinic. The joke is about the clinician's own non-adherence, not about the advice being wrong.