I’m sitting in the lobby of our local hospital waiting for my wife to come out from a routine mammogram. The stillness is broken by the announcement “Code red six west! Code red six west!” followed a few minutes later by the announcement: “Code green. Code green.”
Every hospital has its own method of announcing a cardiac arrest in some part of the hospital. For those of us in the waiting room, life is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the lives of the patient and medical staff on six west. We’re sitting killing time, reading the paper checking our cell phones, trying to quell boredom, yet in another part of the hospital rather than killing time, there is the urgency that time will kill one among us.
With adrenaline pumping and with the professionalism borne of experience the subsequent “Code green’” coming shortly after the first code indicates that the medical team responding has been successful and the silent heart is now beating again. If the patient wasn’t responding to their intervention, they would still be working to restore a heartbeat and would not have given up in such a short time.
We all live our “code green” lives, waiting for our own “code reds;” we should be sure to not take that situation for granted and to make the very most of all that is given to us during our “code green” phase of life.