I find it highly ironic that Muppet Corporate's Ethics team just published a new policy on clinical brain death. Of course, it's in line with the Ethical and Religious Directives…but my question comes back to the ethical nature of psychological brain death. Is it possible? Is it physically possible to think yourself to death?Oh yeah, I am not going to complain about my crazy existence!
Today started with an early meeting with Corporate regarding system-wide grant writing. Apparently, no one in the system writes grants. There are a couple people here and there who have limited grant writing experience, but no one does this on a regular basis. For a system of our size, that shocked me. So when the Muppet CMO recruited me to help write a system grant for $3M, I found myself a bit taken aback. Me? Why me? Oh yeah, because no one else does it! So I met with the Corporate VP of Innovation this morning and we hatched plans for three grant proposals. His thoughts are very, um, round-about and I kept having to pull the discussion back on track.
After two hours (and two cups of coffee), we emerged with our respective responsibilities for the three grants. He's writing the business plans and financial ROI's and I'm writing the skeleton proposal outlines. One of the proposals includes a concurrent care coordination mechanism that is still in its infancy stages in the corporation. While I've had some exposure to this project at corporate quality and operations meetings, I kept pushing for a boiled-down version of the objectives.
After flipping through stacks and piles, the VP couldn't produce one. I know it's a HUGE project with a hundred parts that must all align. It's an elephant and we all know that to eat an elephant, you take one bite at a time…but if you can't see (or even visualize) the elephant, you can't even figure out which fork you need. So I'm working with one powerpoint slide from one of the corporate presentations, trying for myself to define this concurrent care thing. I can't write about it if I don't even know what it is. If the senior execs and corporate don't have proper verbiage and appropriate measurements and metrics, I figured I'd create the conceptual framework and get back to them. I studied philosophy at the undergrad level…the concept of infinity is not lost on me…but I didn't know I'd be helping define infinity. Sigh.
The rest of my day, composed of two looooong Board meetings, seemed rather routine. Board meetings always stretch me and encourage me to continue my Vulcan thinking (more about that another day), but they're exhausting. Then I had a strategic planning meeting during which I broke my watch. Leaving the strategic planning meeting at 6pm, I thought I could finally get to my 'real' work.
Just as I sat down in my office, power was cut to the whole building. The emergency generator kicked on (thankfully), but power is almost never cut to the whole hospital! EVOO and I called facilities and it turns out a nitrogen tank threatened to blow and the safety switch was flipped by the system! Those of us in Administration who were still there had to round and calm everyone. I never did get to my 'real' work today!
Who eats elephants?
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