Since returning from a three week family road trip across my home state of California, I've been in a state of flux, and it's left me feeling uncertain at times, a bit down at others.
For one, it would seem that Rome is burning. An entire third of our trip was altered at the last minute due to devastating fires raging in much of northern California, compounded by a drought that has picturesque small towns that depend on summer tourism scrambling to get sufficient supplies to shower town residents.
More than inconvenience, the fires bring back memories of having lost our family home in the Painted Cave Fire of 1990, the summer before my senior year of high school. A distinct memory from prom that year was a friend and I taking our dates for breakfast on the newly laid foundation where we were rebuilding our home.
Keep in mind that northern California is the rainy, green oasis geography of the state, the part that supplies the arid south as well as the fecund agricultural horn of plenty that is the San Joaquin Valley with water. There goes the neighborhood.
For another, the prospect of returning to the ED during yet another surge is disheartening. I still recall tough moments from the prior surge: diagnosing a 50 year old woman with several days of symptoms with COVID. She explained that she would have sought care earlier, but she had buried her husband just three days before after he died of COVID.
Even the altruists among the service-minded crowd I run with are having trouble getting enthused for the next surge of morbidity and mortality in what (at least in our resource rich nation) is a largely preventable cause of death. It's hard knowing we have a way to keep people out of the ICU and off a ventilator, and that it's being rejected.
I reached out to a friend, who observed that states of flux are also, by definition, times of opportunity. When times are uncertain, boundaries can be redefined and what is possible becomes more elastic.
So I'm trying to take her perspective to heart, reframing the situation to see what good might come from it. Putting out feelers to see what opportunities might be available for using my brain in a new and different way.
There's a sense of uncertainty, of butterflies in the stomach. But it's accompanied by a sense of renewed possibility that something interesting might lay just around the corner, and that's what keeps me awake some nights - with alternately good and fitful dreams.