Dear lord, we work hard, and it’s chaos. We’re clinicians, afterall.

Long nights. Coffee breaks that pass for lunch. “Dinner” from vending machines. Somehow we’re on call 25 hours in a 24 hour day. During that time, one person passes away, but we snatch eight more out of death’s hands. Some of the patients love you. Some don’t, even though you saved them. Some patients don’t seem to know you’re there, but then there’s that family member who keeps saying ‘thank you’ and crying in relief.

And while they had tears in their eyes, I was in the basement recovering eyes for transplant.

So yeah, it’s chaos.

More to the point, it’s everywhere: if you’re an admin, you have doctors who don’t pay attention to the bottom line; and if you’re a doctor, you have admins who only pay attention to the bottom line. Insurance rises, costs spiral upward with it. Technology grows as if it has a mind of its own. Sometimes it doesn’t deliver on promise…

But other times, it delivers miracles. Severely premature babies are born and grow to live happy lives, graduating, getting married, having families of their own, when only a generation ago, they would have died in infancy. Long-standing “incurable” diseases are now wiped out of existence by a simple injection from your syringe.

That’s how it is everywhere: that’s the ER (with more vomit), the OR (with more surgical drapes), and the ICU (with more alarms), and we make it all work. We coordinate, sometimes tripping over each other, sometimes getting on each other’s nerves, but then we pull off a miracle together, and grandma gets to go home and see all of her grandchildren graduate.

So yeah, it’s chaos for us, but it’s beautiful chaos.

It’s wonderful to be who we are, and do what we do, even if we sometimes want to scream and pull our hair out (or somebody else’s). The clinical environment is like a lush, untended garden, overgrown and tangled with every type of flower, fruit, and spice imaginable. It’s craziness. But dear lord, it’s amazing.

No matter whether it’s brain surgery or bedpans, you’re part of saving lives with every move you make. How many people get to say something like that at the end of their work day? Maybe it’s a turbulent sea, but maybe it’s also like surfing the waves.

And it’s definitely like mixing metaphors.

Because that’s what chaos does. So that’s what we do. We revel in the overgrown garden while riding chaotic waves. Yeah, that about sums it up.

So this is Transonic saying “enjoy the ride!” That’s the best any of us can do anyway. But that’s okay…

Because it’s enough.

                      Transonic Systems, Inc

                                              The Measure of Better Results