Labor of Love
- Paul Baumeister
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
“We need this room stat for an unresponsive patient!” the ER attending shouted.
Earlier this past Friday morning, my wife Shazi had experienced pain in her shoulder and arm. Out of an abundance of caution, we went to the emergency room at Rush to make sure everything was okay.
Two young assistants quickly wheeled her bed into the hallway. Within seconds, doctors, residents, nurses, and ER technicians began flooding the tiny treatment room while I scrambled to gather my laptop and charging cords and stuff them haphazardly into my backpack.
A code blared over the PA system. I pushed against the incoming medical team, trying to find where they had taken my wife and was nearly run over by the gurney rushing another patient into the room. I glanced down as it passed.
This wasn’t a trauma victim like some I had seen during previous ER visits. She was an older woman and appeared to be sleeping peacefully. I backed up and found another hallway where I stopped for a moment to catch my breath.
Over the next few hours, while a Rocky marathon ran on the television screen in the corner of Shazi’s new room, we were visited by an ER resident named Abby. She had arrived in Chicago only a few days earlier from Calgary and was completing a series of month-long clinical rotations at four teaching hospitals.
During one of her final check-ins, I asked her, “Do they pay you enough to be here?”
“They don’t compensate me at all,” she said without hesitating.
Abby was paying for the opportunity to work long days in an urban medical center – to learn how to care for people on what might be the most frightening day of their lives. This was what she had chosen for her life’s work.
When I returned home late that evening, I noticed a sepia-toned photograph of my grandmother on the living room bookcase. We called her Nanny. She had also worked in hospitals and was a nurse for much of her extraordinarily long life. My mother once showed me Nanny’s final paycheck – she was 85 at the time.
Nanny lived through the entire twentieth century and died at 101. Born on the side of a mountain in the Smokies, she helped tend to patients during the First World War, later became a nurse, and cared for soldiers during the Second World War. She worked at an Asheville hospital where Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, died tragically in a fire.
During her lifetime, the automobile went from novelty to necessity, airplanes transformed the world, radio gave way to television, and humans walked on the moon. Medicine advanced in ways that would have been unimaginable when she first began caring for patients.
Nanny made very little money. Widowed in her early twenties, she raised my mother by herself and spent much of her adult life living alone in a small apartment in downtown Asheville. Through the decades, she cared for countless people, but the people she cared about most were her grandsons – my brother, John, and me.
In the late 1960s, when Nanny came north to visit, our mother would dress us in pilot outfits to meet her at O’Hare airport. We wore dark suits, caps, and plastic pilot wings. John was a Continental pilot; I flew for Eastern.
As soon as Nanny saw us sitting on old airport Eames chairs, she would sprint through the terminal in her high heels, shouting, “My boys! My boys! My boys!” before smothering us with wet kisses. We were pretending to be pilots, two little boys dressed for lives we had not yet begun to imagine. Nanny had already found hers.
Labor Day has just passed and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what “life’s work” means. We often use the phrase to describe a career – the profession someone enters, the expertise they develop, or the accomplishments they leave behind. But a life’s work can be larger than any occupation and far less orderly than a résumé makes it appear.
Not everyone is called to a hospital room, classroom, pulpit, or profession traditionally associated with service. We choose different paths, shaped by our talents, ambitions, responsibilities, opportunities, and circumstances.
Now, at an unexpected turning point in my career, I find myself thinking less about the title attached to whatever comes next and more about its purpose. Where can the things I know how to do be most useful? Who might benefit from the experience I have accumulated? How can I put what I’ve learned – and what I know how to do – more directly in the service of others?
The older woman brought into the emergency room did not survive. But during the final moments of her life, she was surrounded by people who moved toward her while the rest of us moved out of the way.
Maybe that is the simplest definition of service – and perhaps of a life well lived: discovering what you have to offer, continuing to offer it, and showing up when someone needs you.
About Greenland Sharks
Greenland Sharks is a Chicago men's group who value friendship, experiences, and the long swim. Just a crew that shows up. No speeches. No name tags. No nonsense.
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