One day at work, as I sit in front of the same brightly lit (and aptly named) Chameleon software LIS, doing as I've done for the past 5 yrs, wondering where the last 5 years went. As well as where has my hope that 5 years from then I would be saving lives at some hospital or clinic has gone. Hated the job I served as a technician in a boring field, with a crabby, short man for a director. Hated that I was painfully single, and hated that my salary (after 4 years of college) just doesn't see to make due. I started to feel sorry for myself. Asking "Where did it all go wrong?", if it even went wrong at all? Nursing a migraine, my eyes well up with tears of shame to the point where I could longer make out a single patient report. So I ran to the bathroom mumbling something about "My contacts.." to my coworker. When I start to feel that way, I always call my aunt or my best friends. These are people that know me inside and out and recognize how I often succumb to my own self-pity. But somehow these special, patient, people in my life reveal the sun that exist through clouds I often place there myself. Bad Habit. I don't know where I would be without such individuals and if I ever have anything to thank God about, its them.
My aunt picks up and like clockwork she calms me down. Reassures me that I'm not a failure and reminds me of my upcoming 1st semester of nursing school in the new year (hopefully..). So the conversation starts to go random and she tells me of a mutual friend suffering a horrible ordeal over the weekend. Said friend was awaken by the son of her upstairs neighbor needing assistance. There was a dead woman in her apartment. The young woman who sent her son to get my friend had just found her mother-in-law unresponsive to her daily morning breakfast request. Cold, and still. She was far gone beyond any CPR attempts yet my friend attempted anyway. She knew the woman was dead. EMT called it on the scene and carried the remains of the old woman graciously down the steps of the 5-story walk-up building. The saddest part of this story is that not too long before, her husband spoke to his well-in-health mother as he left for work that morning only to receive a call sometime later with the second worst news of his life. His father had passed just a few months before.
So many victims in the terrible tragedy. The old woman, the young woman, the young woman's husband, the young woman's son, my friend. All will never forget the sight of death right within their own home. And the man that just buried his father now has to put his mother to the same final rest. All in the same season.
Me, sitting here, recalling that remarkably jarring conversation leaves me in total awe of what I could lose, but haven't. What I could have been without, but I'm not. I lack nothing.
I got off the phone with my aunt repenting to God for my ungrateful attitude and went to go tell another coworker about the ordeal. She cuts me off to tell me that a young boy was shot and killed after a youth summer camp program in front of children that were being released. Her kids were there, but thankfully they were not harmed. They could have been. She's visibly upset; the shooter clearly didn't care for the safety of children (or anyone for that matter) to pull out a gun around 3 on a summer afternoon and use it fatally. I don't know if the deceased was involved with gangs or some sort of disagreement. It doesn't matter in the slightest, a life lost to violence is a senseless death. The potential for more causalities in that situation is enough to give any parent nightmares. That same coworker removed her kids from said summer camp program as well as the school. I wish her hustle the best of luck as she attempts to register her three boys at another school for the new school year.
What the hell do we have to complain about?
