My turn

Today, as I walked through the back staircase of Mt. Sinai, traveling between floors, I thought, when I am a patient or a family member, I should remember that this is how the docs and other medical folks get around.

I think thoughts like this often. When it is my turn...I will...

These thoughts have no value to them-positive or negative. I do not feel morbid about them, just shickingly realistic. I feel like I am watching the sneak preview on a film, except I seeing the version where I know too much. My experience of this movie will be different because I alrady have seen the spoiler.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman wrote (in an article I recently read whose title I am forgetting) how illness, health, death, birth, weddings, funerals, life cycle events of all shapes, sizes and varieties are all places we visit in life's journey. He posits that the power of visiting the sick is it is a requisite destination along the way and, just as we (perhaps reluctantly) watch slides shows and look through photos on facebook of other people's trips, we also visit the sick, attend the funeral of our loved one's loved ones, dance at the wedding of your coworkers daughter and so on. We get a sneak peak of what these events will be like when it is our child's wedding, our parent's funeral, our health which has failed.

What strikes me is the certainty I feel that being here on the other side (as patient or family member) is inevitable. Am I clairvoyant? Am I having a vision of my future? Or is this just a natural aspect of this work? I hope this is normal because if there is some disturbance in the force and I am sensing something that will happen...well, that just freaks me out a little bit. Quite frankly, whatever my future my be, I don't want to know in advance.

Really, that would spoil all the fun.