In Memorium 12/14/2012

Editor’s Note:

It is a Sad and Terrible Thing to Lose Children …

This morning there were a lot of kids alive- as well as their teachers- and they are gone now.  They are so very much gone.

This morning was a windy day in Texas- and my daughter remarked as we went on the drive to school- that “the sky looked weird”.

I just blew it off– but it was the way she said it that made me take a second look and see that indeed the sky did have an “end-of-the-world” look to it.

It was a yellow – black that would make you think tornado if wasn’t the time of the year that it was.  But I remember thinking- “what if”.  She just made me think if there was something more getting ready to happen.  And it was brief- just a hint and then gone.  7:00 am.

As an afterthought while I drove my son Justin to pre-school, I wondered if I was being stupid by ignoring my young (8) girl’s observation.  She had never said anything like that before- and she said it with conviction.

So off to work…

I spent today with some really good folks, doing something very special, and helping a patient get through a pretty tough pump run and open-heart surgery.

A couple of valve replacements, two grafts, and some surgical resolution to an afib problem.  In the beginning, we all knew it would be a tough case.

It’s a thing called the trenches.  You just know it’s going to be hard- but you, well-  you just get through it.  That’s where teams are formed, bonds are made, and trust becomes a condition as opposed to an event.

You get through it and keep getting through it until some news seeps in from the outside world- an unexpected canary that decides to pop into our little cocoon called heart surgery-and lay down some seriously bad news.

In this case it was more than just bad– it was really really bad news- of kids and parents and teachers being killed at a school.

Here we are trying to keep someone alive, and at the same time, the lights of innocents are being put out before they ever had a chance to change the world and light their own candles.

Lost.

So I don’t know what to say- as a parent- as a man- as anything.  So I will do it with pictures of a team that did make a difference on this particular day- in honor of the effort they make every day to deliver us all-

To a better place.

I choose to look at today and the people I work with.

And godspeed to the souls that left us.

fa ccp

The picture speaks for itself…

For The Rest of Us & Why We Continue …

Just an FYI ?

The PLAN worked, we did what we had to do- got it done, and LIFE GOES ON.

This post isn’t ABOUT us and what we did today.

This post is about the the lives that could have been- and what they were going to become.  This post is about the other side of the coin that is humanity.  It is about the best of what we can do when we decide to do it.