Saviours

If I can impart any sort of wisdom to my children, the one thing I would like to teach them is the saying, “What better purpose on earth than to make life easier for one another”. I can’t remember who said it or where I heard it, but it’s probably my favourite motto and the one I strive the most in life to live by.

This weekend- - while faced with the reality of the next worse thing to being-on-call-all-weekend-AND-working-the-walk-in-clinic, I encountered many individuals who managed, flawlessly, to live by my motto with lucky me being at the receiving end of it all.

Sunday morning, after only 5 hours of sleep, I dreamt that I had been shot in the neck. As I rolled over to tell Rob about my CRAZY dream, I realized WHY I had dreamt it. I couldn’t move my neck. Well, I COULD move my neck, but the screaming probably would have woken the neighbours up. When Rob asked me what I’d DONE to my poor neck, my answer was only, “What HAVEN”T I done?”
Was it the stress of rounding on 25 patients that I didn’t know yesterday? Was it the 5 hours of operating in the OR until midnight last night? Was it the middle of the night JOLT that occurs when you are woken up by your pager? Or was it the hours I spent bent over paperwork?

Whatever it was….I had to do it all again that day. So I said to my neck, “With or without you, neck, the head and I are going to work today”. It reluctantly agreed to come along with us but not without letting me know how it felt about it.

Saviour number 1 were the ICU nurses. As I hobbled into the ICU they were in the staff room charting. One look at me and I was ordered to drop my bags, peel my clothes off and sit down for a massage. ICU nurses are BUSY. But man, can they give good massages. And the fact that they took the time to loosen me up and listen to my bitching was above and beyond. By the end of my 15 minutes in the ICU I could turn my head about 5 degrees in either direction. I was sent on my way with promises of hourly back rubs and a quiet pager.

Saviour #2 was my colleague, Mark, who rounded in the ICU after me and heard from the concerned nurses about my neck. He didn’t even hesitate before offering me a script for muscle relaxants and a promise to round on my inpatients while I lay drugged up in a flexeril-induced-stupor.

For a colleague to even OFFER to take over your load for the rest of the weekend is truly altruistic.

I didn’t take him up on the offer, but I didn’t need to. What started off looking like a never-ending day of pain and suffering, soon turned into a day of gratitude. If only we could all learn to do the same. What a wonderful world we would live in...