At the end of the first week of November, we got a foot of snow and the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below average. I don’t think that’s funny. I’m settling into my winter routine. Right now I’m living on toast, eggnog and bitter disappointment. Some of you might think that’s not exactly a nutritionally balanced meal. I understand your concern, so I’m adding a margarita every now and then. It’s strictly for medicinal reasons - I need enough lime juice to fend off scurvy. We had to make a quick trip to Sioux Falls – around six hours down and back. On the way home I got sleepy, so I asked my wife is she would please drive. I was thinking only of her; she gets so cranky when I fall asleep while driving. My wife learned to drive in a Buick, one of those 60’s models big enough to have it’s own zip code, but she’s been driving front wheel drive cars for a few decades now and she may have lost some of the survival habits of rear wheel drive on ice. Just north of Clear Lake we hit a patch of ice and the back wheels decided they wanted to be in front for a while. I drove the rest of the way, although we were now both wide-awake. When I got behind the wheel, I kept it under 45 and put it in four-wheel drive. It took a little longer to get home, but we did actually, you know, get home and the back wheels stayed where they belonged. This might seem like an odd beginning to a Thanksgiving week column, but stay with me. We were in Sioux Falls to visit my sister-in-law. She was shoveling her sidewalk when a brutal headache hit like a sledgehammer. A few minutes later she was in the emergency room and a few hours later, a snow-covered ambulance delivered her to an ICU. My wife got a phone call that made her wince and I looked over her shoulder as she wrote “subarachnoid hemorrhage” on a scrap of paper. When she went into the other room, I looked those words up and I was not reassured. And yet, when we saw her a couple of days later, she was looking without favor at a hospital ham and cheese sandwich and taking slow sips of a Pepsi. The doctors had done one of those “I-can’t-believe-they-can-do-that” sort of things and it looks like she is going to be okay. In fact, it looks like she might be home for Thanksgiving. This paragraph was going to start with, “We live in a world of miracles.” That is true, and I’m eternally grateful and amazed by the wonders that surround me, but this story is in many ways better than a miracle. The story starts with a neighbor rushing my sister-in-law to the hospital and continues with a group of people who probably weren’t thrilled with the idea of a 150-mile drive on icy, snow-packed roads in an unwieldy ambulance. Still, the weather was too bad to send a helicopter, so they saddled up and drove through the storm. It’s a story of skilled, dedicated people. Some of them knew and cared about my sister-in-law, but to most, the fact that she was simply another stranger through the door didn’t diminish the intensity of their concern. Part of the story is the generations of scientists, doctors, and inventors that developed the techniques that saved her life, and their work would be of little value without the expert workers and technicians who built the sophisticated equipment that filled her room. And all their efforts were made possible by the system of insurance that makes this level of care available for many (sadly, not all, not yet) people and not just for the very rich. It was an entire network of dedicated individuals and organizations, possible only in a civil society in which innovation is encouraged and people matter. What saved my sister-in-law’s life wasn’t a miracle. It was better than that. Happy Thanksgiving. Copyright 2014 Brent Olson
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 11:26:34 +0000
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