Grateful

Life is so short.

I'm repeatedly reminded of this and oddly, not as often as you'd think. Yes, I work in a hospital and regularly hear things like "Code blue" and "Anesthesia, please report to the ER" paged over the intercom. You know people die every day, within the same walls of the same hospital that occupies your office.

Yet, it's pretty removed. The only time I hear about a specific death is if it's a community figure and it hits the paper or if it's a tragic death (and hits the paper). One time, my hospice unit misplaced a body and that was just fun. Don't worry, we found him immediately; the paperwork was not completed and routed correctly.

Anyway, my job is hard. Some mornings I drive to work with a pit in my stomach, uncertain of how I'm going to survive a given situation. Sometimes I dread work, knowing I have to make difficult decisions that are going to affect peoples' lives. But, I suddenly realized, this is probably as easy as I'm ever going to have it.

Y'know, unless I start that dog-walking service or become a professional surfer.

Not to belittle those two careers; I'm sure surfers have very specific stress about sharks eating them without them noticing.

It's probably not too different on Wall Street!

[I won't walk the dogs on Wall Street.]

So even though I chastise myself for not doing enough or that I could be doing things better, I'm still alive.

Which is more than I can say for one of my employees, who was just diagnosed with breast cancer AND had her brother drop dead yesterday. It really made me grateful for my life.

Let's all be grateful for our lives. If everyone we knew met around the perimeter of a football field and threw our problems in the middle of the field, we'd probably choose to go home with our own problems. Other people are dealing with so much more than we are. Let's be grateful for our problems because they're most likely better than someone else's!