Human beings are a fascinating brand of creature.  We’re the only ones who can set about our own destruction and then blame the universe for the bomb that we both built and lit the damn fuse.  I’m guilty of it myself, truly.  Thinking I know best in a circumstance because I’m too afraid to let someone else make the shot and I’m not sure I’ll be able to fix it if it fails…and I am so tired of cleaning up after other people’s crap.  I digress, the point is we’re human and we all do it.  That stubbornness finds us all at some point.  In some cases I say stubbornness does us good.  It means we set a boundary and we stand firm in it.  But we’ve started a trend where we want to be right just to be right, we talk just to talk, we show up just to be seen.  We’ve also allowed opinion to be treated as fact and feelings to be glorified over fact.  We’ve also lost sight of the fact that multiple things can be true at once.  And at what cost?  What length will people go to just to be seen/heard/right?  Well, if we really think about it, we know that answer—people will do ANYTHING for that kind of perceived power.  No one can tell us what to do because it’s our right, blah blah blah. Well, that may be true but it doesn’t excise or excuse any of us from the consequences of those decisions.

Case in point was a story shared from a colleague regarding a patient with pulmonary hypertension.  There were some issues on a consensus for treatment where the maintenance measures prior to surgical intervention were handled less aggressively than it should have been—other measures could have been taken to ensure better stability.  The anesthesiologist noted the patient needed a cardiac consult due to potential complications from anesthesia (up to and including death) that needed to be and (could be) addressed prior to surgery.  The surgeon ignored that recommendation and scheduled the patient prior to the consult to which the anesthesiologist canceled the procedure citing safety concerns.  The physicians met, the situation was explained, and they still disagreed.  The surgeon contacted the patient and rescheduled prior to cardiac consult again so the anesthesiologist reached out to the patient to explain the risks/issues.  The patient was more upset about the inconvenience to their schedule than the risk to their life.  So, this is an actual life or death situation and said patient chose to risk their life for the sake of convenience.  I’ll note that I have no knowledge of the patient’s situation—was it a work conflict, could they not arrange care for a later date, not thinking right with extreme anxiety, etc.—but for the sake of waiting a day, they’d put their entire life on the line.  And for the sake of waiting a day the surgeon would risk their patient’s life for scheduling convenience. 

With that story and acknowledgement made, I have to express that, no matter the reason, it astounds me what hill people are willing to die on—potentially literally.  Frankly, I admire persistence and grit and drive.  I admire courage to call our own shots and those who seem to live this fearless existence.  What I don’t admire is the need to be right driving people into the ground.  I don’t admire the desire to be seen creating so much animosity and stubbornness in this world that we do things unsafely.  I don’t admire that we’ve prioritized speed over sanity, getting it done over getting it right.  There’s a time and a place for each but ego should not come at the cost of life.  And look, we’re talking about fully grown adults who are capable of making their own decisions and that IS their prerogative.  But we also have the choice to let them be accountable for their own decisions.  The saying you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink is exactly where we are at in this society.  We can’t change it.  All I know is I don’t want to spend my time fighting the horses anymore but stopping fighting doesn’t make it any easier.  Those horses still exist and a lot of people are listening when they say, “it’s cool to not drink,” until they drop dead.  I want to be an example of knowing when we need to drink and when we need to abstain.  I also want to be an example of learning to know the difference.  We move fast, we push hard, we create realities (some of them not even real), and we love distraction.  We all need to pump the brakes a bit and listen to what our knowing tells us.  When we stop hearing what everyone else says, we hear what the world says—and we have no problem following that.