When your emotional account is overdrawn and, suddenly you know...

It had been a very tough week at the hospital. 20-plus patients every day, intubations, ventilators, worried families needing lots of time and 7 days of 24-hr call. Not much sleep; slow, icy drives to and from home over the mountains. Now it was over and I was too wired to sleep. It was very early morning, still quite dark out and I had just booted up my laptop. Then suddenly…there he was, staring at me. I had not seen him so clearly since looking into the fogged mirror as I shaved off the mustache I had worn for 40 years that first morning after coming back to the States on terminal leave from the military and two years in Afghanistan. There in the black background of the computer screen his eyes again looked into mine; the face was so clearly his but not as I last saw him...younger, late sixties, I think.

I remember him well then; still in private practice on the north side of Evansville, Indiana, working out of two rooms he had leased from the Holiday Inn just past the bridge into town I have driven over a thousand times. He had been there since a bad snow in the late ‘70’s had shut off power and frozen pipes in the basement rancher we had lived in just north of Evansville on about five acres out in the country. His office had been in the walk-out basement since 1958. The large downstairs family room had been converted into a waiting room and his clinical space was the wet bar room adjacent. The house was new when we moved in and designed for entertaining, but Dad had put it to more practical use. However, that waiting room’s capacity was frequently exceeded and often extended into the yard and patio with many cars in the drive. There were always people walking or sitting all about. I never was inhibited or distracted by these patients but my path was off into the woods far from the house in those halcyon days and so they were always far behind me. But, in retrospect, Mom was kind of a prisoner in her home on those frequent office days so she was rather pleased with the move to the hotel rooms. The office never came back home. The kids were gone by then, the youngest, my sister, left in 1970 and it was just Mom and Dad; but now Mom was in her element…complete silence in the home all day. On the rare occasions we kids were back at the house in the seventies and eighties, it was always in disrepair; those cuts in the ceiling from the frozen pipes never were closed with constant leaking; hoarding abounded. I had not noticed how unhappy they had become; my lenses were distorted by persistent childhood fantasies and work-a-day adult distractions. But now, in that screen, I saw the bags under his eyes, the weariness in his face and now noticed the loss of joy in the lines from the relentless march of time.

And then he was gone. My own face stared back at me.

That was where I was in the last week of 2017, the year I worked 236 12-hour shifts, many with 24 hour call. I decided in Jan of 2018 that I would never work the kind of hours I had. I had given too much. My emotional bank account was overdrawn. I needed, like my dear Mom, more quiet, alone time...time to again imagine. I took a little the morning I wrote the above as I sat quietly and remembered. But I needed more. Even as I slowed down in 2018 to less than 200 shifts with call, I was still doing hundreds of hours of locums work out of state still sleeping in motels as much as 16 days a month. I was able to get work closer to home in 2019 but still out of town several weeks a year when in August of 2019 I was in the emergency department to admit a patient and I overheard a nurse say to a co-worker, "I have 18 more years to work before I can retire." I stopped, looked at her and repeated her words but with a question mark; then stated, "I have only 18 more years to live!" I may have spoken this to the small group of staff in the ED nursing station but the true audience was singular. It was my "Ah-ha" moment; suddenly...I knew. It didn't take a genius to do that math. 18 years almost from that very day would be the age for me that my father was when he passed away in 2010. A month later I stopped those seven-day, 12-hr with 24-hr call hospital shifts I had been working since I retired from the Air Force in 2012. There was still much that I wished to do, all the things I had said to myself: "...someday."

That moment was my someday. And now, I have started something new, something which stirs me. Beginnings really are magic. Life is short; live it with joy. Re-invent yourself to become what you have dreamed, not what others expect. Become...now. There is never any time in which to act, to be, but now. Take care of yourself, sleep in your own bed at night, go for walks, be gentle with all for all are struggling with something; judge less, love more. Many that surround you are deformed or crippled by wounds from battles you will never know bearing scars that are often invisible, or worse, misinterpreted. Trust...and be still. Quiet begets peace and we all need a lot more of that.