From Cary Chisholm

Hey IronMen. Sorry I haven’t been around much, but I’m now doing my rotations for medical school, so unfortunately my schedule is awful. Before I share my thoughts, I just want to ask for prayers for Leann and me. We are not having problems, and I would like to keep it that way while I’m spending so much time at the hospital. The only way to do that is with God’s help during this time (and even not during this time of course).

So this last Saturday I had my first patient die. Well, he wasn’t my patient, but I was on call that night so he was mine by default. About six in the morning my pager went off and woke me up in the call room. I slipped on my shoes (no socks or tying the laces…dying people don’t like to wait for those things) and ran down the hall with the other 4 people on call. We are the code team on our on-call nights, so when a code blue is called, we all get paged. As we arrived on the 13th floor, the nurses had already started CPR and the man’s family was in the hall. Ahmad and I rotated doing chest compressions while our residents ran the code. We got a heart rhythm back briefly after about 20 minutes of CPR, but we lost it again when we tried to move his bed down the hall to go to the ICU. After another 10 minutes of CPR, the man’s family wanted us to stop, because they realized that their husband/father was gone. 30 total minutes of CPR, 2 or 3 episodes of shocking him, and using 2 crash carts of medicine weren’t enough to bring this guy back. Granted, he wasn’t expected to live much longer anyway. He was already in kidney failure and just had heart bypass surgery. In spite of those things, using the best technology and latest research guidelines weren’t enough. Our best effort wasn’t enough. It was just his time to go.

Then there are those crazy stories on the news. You know, where a guy dies because he somehow manages to drive his car into a second story apartment (true story). People get struck by lightening when there are no rain clouds. Young athletes die while playing basketball during a high school or college game. People get attacked by sharks in fresh water. People who smoke, drink, and do drugs sometimes manage to live into very old age without being sick, while those of us who take care of ourselves sometimes die young or live into old age in terrible health. The fact is, sometimes, it’s just our time to go. Our entrance into the next life is not controlled by us: Nothing we can do can help us. Exercise, eating right, taking the right vitamins, going to the doctor regularly, not drinking and driving, avoiding drugs…they can’t keep you alive when God has called you home. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we have only a limited time here on earth.

What is on my heart this week is that each of us take time each day to value and love our wives, children, parents, and friends, because none of us knows when God will call us home. For me, it entails spending the first 2-3 hours of each day with Leann when I get home from the hospital before I study. Even though I am losing a lot of study time by doing so, God has blessed me in my schooling, I believe, in part because I have kept my wife as a priority over school. Even though sometimes we feel that giving up extra time each day to spend with our families may hurt us in other areas, God will bless your prioritizing, and He will bless those activities that you give up. For some it’s studying, for others it’s work that they bring home from the office, for others it’s TV or movies or sports, and for others it’s (fill in the blank). The point is, we all are busy. We all have other things to do when we get home. Sometimes we all want a break away from wives and kids. Just don’t move them down on your priority list. Make sure that each night as you go to bed, you have no doubt that you did everything you could that day to let your family know you love them. You never know when you will not have another day to do so.

Cary Chisholm - an IronMan