Attention all departments!

Adult code blue

Main hospital, 5^th floor, Room 5358

It felt odd to be sitting in the waiting room as my husband was going through a simple procedure in the GI lab and hear those words across the public-address system. Some hospitals use pagers to call the necessary personnel for these emergencies, which if you ask me, seems the better thing. This one alerts everyone!!! I have to confess that I was relieved not to hear “GI Lab” as the location.

Code blue? In a hospital setting, it typically refers to cardiopulmonary arrest, in other words, someone is in heart failure.

I was thinking that in a single moment the life trajectory of that person and perhaps those who know the patient on the 5^th floor is definitely in flux, if not making a grand shift.

Most of us live as if we will never face death. Denial alleviates unwanted feelings, or so we think.

You might be thinking, “Of course, it is morbid to think about death and the possibility of dying.”

I want to suggest it is unwise to not consider it and instead, expect it. It is, after all, inevitable, but that isn’t what I am hinting at here.

The reason we must understand that someday our lives will cease is because if we do not, we will never fully live.

We will rather let life come at us, as we pull hard against the current and try to navigate it. We will give it the power (and other people) to decide for us and take us where it will. Most likely, we will fail to find what we are created to do and follow that course and IF we have any time to look back as our final days approach, we will wrestle with regret.

Another announcement wafts through the building: