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Perspective Watching Miners Rescue

Life definitely keeps you grounded. Today has been a time of emotional ups and downs. Things started off on quite a high and I was finishing up the Swedish Medical Center Health Care Symposium. It's fun doing the entire live tweeting thing. Not only does it keep me on my toes as far as paying attention to the lecture and tweeting that out.

I was about 30 minutes before boarding my flight at SeaTac, when it was announced that my flight would be delayed for 2 hours due to mechanical problems. I knew that I was going to miss my connecting flight. So, I knew that I had to rebook my flight - hoping to get back to my home airport tonight. I was told that it was impossible to get home tonight, and that the earliest that I could get home was tomorrow.

Needless to say, I was really upset by this. No only am I in the office tomorrow, I'm also on call tonorrow night. Being mad and embarrassed, I had to call my office to let them know that I had to cancel most of my morning patients and to let them know that I would not be able to be on call until I got back in town.

As soon as I was able to arrange that, I heard the announcement that the "mechanical problem" was now fixed and that they would be boarding immediately. I had already got new boarding passes, and I could not get things switched back. I would still miss my connecting flight anyway.

For the next few hours, I remained mad. But I tried to make the best of things, by getting back to watch the live stream of #Swedish100 conference, take the picture above, and tweeting away again. That was fun to virtually re-connect with friends - at least for a little bit.

As I'm writing this, it is around 8:30pm pacific time, and on the TV right now is the coverage of the rescue of the miners in Chile (as of this post the first of 33 miners rescued in Chile). That leads my thoughts to the families of these miners who have been hoping for a miracle for the past few weeks. Suddenly, all my problems seem so small. My thoughts and prayers are with the miners and their families....