Could Someone Use a Thank You?

Could Someone Use a Thank You?

Can you remember the last time someone told you thanks? How did it make you feel? I can remember a particularly low time in my career when I felt I was not making an impact. I realized one of the reasons I felt that way was because no one had said thank you to me in months. 

I am currently writing a musical about medicine. I was excited to see the opening scene performed in a recent Southern Oregon showcase of upcoming musicals. One day last week I woke up at 5am remembering a particular time when someone told me thank you, and I realized that event needed to be included in the musical. I jotted down a note in the pad on my nightstand so I would remember to add it to my musical, but I could not get back to sleep, as I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would present the story. I finally got up and went to my office to write the scene.

This particular thank you became an annual event in my life as she returned to me every year on the anniversary of her death. 

(In the spirit of thank you, since you read this far, I would like to thank you for following my writing. If you wish to have any or all of my first four books, I would be happy to send you autographed copies. No charge. Not even for shipping and handling! These books are “Starting Your Practice Right” (About finding the right job and keeping it.) “Eliminating Debt,” “Career Alternatives and Retirement,” and “Investing in Real Estate.” Contact me with your name and shipping address and I’ll be happy to send you this gift as a thank you for reading my stories.)

This thank you story is now part of my musical and I thought I would share my account of this event with you for Thanksgiving.

One day, only a few years into my surgical practice, I was walking down the hall in the hospital when an alarm sounded in the PA system for a code blue in the room I happened to be walking past. I ran into the room as the first doctor to respond and encountered a patient who was essentially dead. The nurse who called the code blue was in the room and said she came in to check on the patient and found her unconscious without a pulse or respirations. I started CPR and the room began to fill with people. I passed off the chest compression job to someone else, and I began respirations with an Ambu bag from the code cart that had just arrived. 

Since this happened about 30 years ago, my memory of the exact details involved in the code are fuzzy and probably irrelevant. At the time, there was nothing remarkable about the event, as it was just part of the day in the life of a general surgeon. We got her pulse and respirations back and moved her to the ICU where she made a full recovery over the next few days. 

She was not my patient, and I did not know her at the time, so I did not follow her care after the code. I do know she went home having no ill effects from her “death” and “resurrection” via CPR. 

One year later, as I was making rounds, a nurse I did not recognize came up to me out of the blue and gave me a big hug. I was quite surprised and asked what that was all about. She told me it was our anniversary. One year ago that day, she had died and I was the doctor who brought her back to life. It was the anniversary of her death. She believed that if I had not happened to be near her room when the code was called, she might not be alive today.

She told me she was emotionally reminiscing the event that day and was so thankful for me that she decided to track me down to let me know of her gratitude. Her young son still has his mother. Every year after that, she tracked me down on the anniversary and gave me a hug and a thank you. That thank you always made my week so much brighter. 

It has been many years since I received a hug from her, as I retired a decade ago. Wow how time flies. I had forgotten about her until that 5am awakening when she returned to my thoughts. I decided to look her up with a little online sleuthing to see if she is still around. I found her active on Facebook. She is in her 70s, loving life and posting gobs of pictures of her grandkids and dogs. Lots of dogs! Just seeing her enjoying life brings back the feelings I got every time she said thank you.

The impact of a thank you can be tremendous. It’s a great way to lift the spirit of others. Who’s spirit can you lift by telling them thank you today? Who knows, it just might lift your spirit as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!