From the Factory Floor, Someone Saved Your Life

I wrote this letter to Nissan nearly five years ago hoping it would reach you. I don't know if you ever saw it. I hope you did. I like to think that the person at P.O Box 685003 got it to you. I want to share it with you again as a reminder that your job — that the hard, routine work you do, that many people do everyday, often to little recognition — can matter in ways you and they never imagined.

Dear Nissan Employee:

Somewhere in a Nissan factory, you are working on the assembly line going about your day. You might be putting on a set of brakes, or finishing up installing an air bag or anchoring down the final assembly of a seatbelt. You might be looking up at the clock and thinking about quitting time or perhaps the soccer game your kid will be playing this upcoming weekend. You might be having a good day or a bad day or perhaps just one of those ‘days’ that melts into the next and into the next. You most likely will not be thinking for a minute that what you do right now will save my life or years down the line that of a six-year-old child dying of an allergic reaction. Confused? Let me explain…and say thank you.

My name is Louis Profeta. I am an emergency physician in Indianapolis, Indiana. I think I have a pretty stressful job, that of an ER doc in a major metropolitan emergency room but who doesn’t have a stressful job. I have been doing this a long time. It’s an amazing profession, lots of rewards, sometimes magical, other times tragic. Like any job, you just have to sometimes, step back, just go somewhere, lie down and breathe. So I did just that.

A friend of mine and I hopped a plane and headed for the Caribbean. I was so looking forward for a chance to just get away and relax for a few days in the Turks and Caicos Islands. I rented a late model Nissan Sunny at a bargain rate and settled down for a week of relaxation. 

I was not on the island for five hours when I was involved in a head-on collision with a truck at nearly 40 miles an hour. The impact was incredible, but the breaks slowed the car, the seatbelt held, and the air bags deployed. I suffered rib fractures, a sternal fracture, two broken fingers and multiple bruises. My friend suffered a broken arm, multiple severe lacerations and some minor internal injuries. While he was trapped, I stumbled from the car and lay dying (or so I thought) on the side of the road. The pain was incomprehensible and I could not breathe as I had hoped I would on this trip. I looked up at the dark sky, took one last breath and said “time to die.” I made my peace with God and I waited ... and I waited. 

I am happy to say that after a long recovery both my buddy and I are doing great. I’m even back to playing basketball. My kids and his kids still have fathers that can hug them and love them and our wives still have their husbands. I can’t be any more forthright in my description than that. My partners in the ER look at the photos and can’t help but get choked with tears since they know there is no way the occupants of that car survive that impact, but we did thanks to you. We in the ER know all too well. We see thousands of these photos that the paramedics bring to us attached to the gurneys of the injured and the dying. We know that whoever was in that photo in most all likelihood was killed. We weren’t; we are still here.

Last week, I was on my shift when a frantic mother rushed a child into the ER. It was one of the toughest cases I have had in years. She had a near fatal allergic reaction. I was performing CPR on this child in front of her parents. I had to put her on a breathing machine and dig deep into my years of training to save her. I am thrilled to say she survived and she did great. She went home today. But somewhere in the course of this event, while I was desperately trying to save this child, my mind flashed back to you, some worker in some Nissan plant, doing some job you might love or you might hate, who has no idea that what you are doing has such an amazing and spiritual impact on the world.  I just thought I needed to say thank you.

Sincerely,

Louis M. Profeta MD

Dr. Louis M. Profeta is an emergency physician practicing in Indianapolis. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, The Patient in Room Nine Says He's God.

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