When you grow up
as the child of a nurse, you go into the world armed with a lot of information
that is useful, petrifying, and some of it fun at parties.
Nurses tend to
diagnose everyone and share the findings at Thanksgiving dinner, when they meet
your prom date, and with other parents on the bleachers at baseball games. If
two or more of them are together you can pretty much leave them alone for hours
as they share war stories. The favorite
refrain being, “Does this bother you.?
Guess I don’t think anything of it.”
She’d leave the
house for a double shift with chores written in shorthand and with the
understanding that if she didn’t work, we didn’t eat. So if I’m sick, I BETTER
be sick.
Being a kid with
asthma stinks, but has its advantages.
If you don’t want to do something anymore you just say you cant breath
and you sort of get a pass. However, the
2 or 4 am rushes to Broward General weren’t as fun. The drug of choice, which has since been
banned, was Primatene Mist. When that
didn’t work and mom needed a solution at 2 am, she first reached for
pepper. I’d sniff it and start sneezing
like crazy. This would probably get a call from DCF now, but the simple
solution was to sneeze a lot, clear my head, calm down, and breathe again.
When you are a
kid with asthma, you grow up to be an adult that doesn’t take breaths for
granted. You try and fail and learn and
succeed but thinking it to death is like having pepper when you cant breath and
waiting for clinical trials on a wonder drug.
Years later I
had “outgrown” asthma. Travelling in
Arizona at 2 am something hit me though.
Something in the environment that shot my eyes wide open and took me
back 25 years. Desperate for air, no
inhaler in site. My back hurt from the
gasping. Emergency room in a foreign
city, deep Tony Robbins cleansing breathes, or get downstairs and find some
pepper.
I walked toward
the door and looked to the counter. You
would have thought that I was Scarface as I poured the 2 small packets out and
went all Martin Short in Inner space to sneeze (good luck ever tying those two
movies together again)
Firms spend a
lot of money on people that “know more” and promise solutions. Is your firm gasping for air? Maybe the attorney that you had in mind to
take over just left. Your growth is based on bringing on more people with
revenue. Trim a group. It’s all ways to catch your breath.
Sometimes
desperation seeks the simple solution, and knowing the symptoms makes it easier
to find the cure.
Does your
practice need a miracle cure or do you just need to catch your breath?
Let me pass you
the pepper..
Andrew Wilcox at (850) 629-9073, or Andrew@Wilcox-legal.com
