Keep life in perspective

I know I should be more like my responsible co-workers and be posting reports here that help farmers grow better crops, or harvest more pounds of beef per acre, but ideas for this column usually come from what’s on my mind at the moment. And this morning before I head off to a Foothills Forage Association field day I was thinking briefly about priorities in life.

The events with this Bryce guy over the past few days just bring home a message of how people’s lives can change on a dime. As odd as it sounds, it would probably do everyone good to spend a day just listening and watching in the waiting room of a hospital Intensive Care Unit. You think you got problems today? Well just look around.

I am feeling angst for Bryce and his family, and I am not dropping in at the hospital to learn everyone else’s business, but I went with Bryce’s mother, Joan, to his bed in the ICU yesterday, and it is like walking through a portal into another dimension.

There are hospital gurneys everywhere, rows of curtained rooms running off in all directions, some rooms are quiet as a patient lays alone, or there may be a couple family members sitting quietly beside the bed. And then you run into a cluster of doctors consulting on a case, and everywhere nurses are buzzing about checking and adjusting equipment. Around just about every bed was a small forest of electronic equipment monitoring and controlling body conditions I can’t imagine.

It is incorrect to think ‘this is not a good place’, because quite the opposite - miracles and recovery are taking place everywhere. But, at the same time, you have to realize for someone to get here, likely something bad had to happen. These just aren’t old people whose time had come.

In one curtained room was a ranching family from Stettler in central Alberta, who for the past 10 or 12 days had been maintaining a vigil over a young man who had serious injuries after a horse rolled on him. In another bed was a young woman fighting for life due to anorexia. In another bed was a young man who suffered serious injuries in a car accident in the city a few days before.

My biggest concern of the day had been guilt over having fries for lunch because I really should be working harder to lose that next 10 or 15 pounds.  My wife and I are fine, our kids are fine and busy with their lives, but that isn’t the case for everyone.

In reality, we can’t just sit around all day holding hands with healthy family members talking about gratitude. But it is important to keep life in perspective. I have a bunch of work to get done before the next deadline. It may be raining today, which means the plans of a farmer for combining that field are on hold, again. And after managing that cow herd all year, the rancher has a nagging question of whether calf prices will be decent on sale day.

Those things are all important too. But somewhere in the back of your mind you have to remember there could come a day when the most welcome and joyous words you’d give anything to hear are “Mom and Dad what’s for supper tonight?”  And with that every other problem seems pretty manageable.

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