One of the most heart wrenching situations that I ever had was a young husband, father of two young children, construction worker, tough guy, worked hard all his life, loved his family, just managed to get a down payment on a home.
He's got his plans. He's remodeling the home.
He's told that there was a spot on his liver which had been identified on a medical test two years earlier and nobody bothered to tell him about it. He's got liver cancer; six months to live. I'm sitting at the table in his dining room and in the background I see his two young daughters wrapping presents, laughing, as you'd like to see your children enjoy Christmas. Christmas tree decorated. The mother is watching the children. They're engaged in the Christmas spirit. And here's this construction worker looking at me and telling me, I want to have this a memorable Christmas for my children.
And it's hard because when I sit in that room with them, the only thought going through my mind is this is my last Christmas and I'm afraid I'm going go break down and cry. And I can't do that because that would devastate my children. And I don't want to leave this world with them having a vision of their father crying on a Christmas morning.
So I stay in this room and enjoy the laughter I hear, but I can't look at it.
Now that's something you, you can't read in a book. You can't, you can't convey it by words, it's got to come from inside. You have to know what that feeling is all about. You have to know how it affects people. And we're all different.
Everybody has their own thresholds for fear, anger, frustration.
And it's my good fortune to be able to step into those families and handle some of the problems for them because there's no other place to turn. We live in a world where everything is becoming specialized and nobody wants to take responsibility for the full entire picture. And that's how we're having a lot of these unnecessary mistakes.
Doctors order tests.
Tests are performed by another specialist.
Read by yet another one, then reported and nobody's looking at the big picture. Oftentimes they're simply looking only at what they describe their job to be. But that's not what they tell the patient.
When the patient comes into the doctor's office, they don't say, I only order tests, I don't read them, I don't interrupt them.
So if there's a mistake on that end don't blame me.
These are things that in our society now are, are prevalent. But when there's a mistake it has human consequences. It's, it's not you made a mistake in putting the windshield in an automobile when you're repairing it and so you can take it out and put another one back in again, or buy another car. You can't do that with life.
