Angels

As I’ve mentioned before, I work in an administrative office for a cancer center. Our building has 4 floors. The first floor has administrative offices and an outpatient clinic, second and third floors are our inpatient areas and the fourth floor has faculty offices and a few research labs. Early one morning, my boss had to show me the location of someone’s office because I was going to escort a candidate there for an interview and it sucks to be wandering around with a candidate like you don’t know anything about where you work. Been there, done that.

She and I are chatting, going up in the elevator and the doors open on one of the patient floors and standing before us are 3 lovely ladies dressed perfectly in white. Now, I’m not religious, but they looked like angels. Angels with a clip board, white gloves and someone they were kindly escorting on to the afterlife. They were standing around what looked to be a kind of stretcher and the stretcher was covered with this perfect white plastic sheath. Its seams were all perfectly straight, no sagging, no impression of what was beneath it. But I have a very strong suspicion that what was on the stretcher was someone who lost the war. We found ourselves standing outside the elevator on the wrong floor kind of staring at them. They smiled at us kindly and softly, going about their business, waiting on an elevator to take them down. Seeing them kind of threw us both off balance. We kind of stammered, turned around to see what floor we were on and that we needed to keep going. So we slipped back on the elevator and went on up to the fourth floor. This all happened in about 3-5 seconds, but the imagery has stuck with me, like so many other times at this place.

Healthcare is tough, but its home.