I am sure that you all occasionally receive a grateful letter from a patient or family member. I won’t forget the day I came home and found a legal-sized envelope that had a soft blue background with clouds and a return address of heaven. It was from Blaise, a 6-year-old who had died from metastatic medulloblastoma a couple of months before. He thanked me for being there for all of his procedures, providing anesthesia or sedation and letting me know he was having a good time in heaven. As you can guess, the letter was from his mother, who taught me a great deal about love and faith.
I start with this story because I want all of us to remember as we are confronted with many professional issues of administrative burden, burnout, economic discrimination and practice disruptions why we became anesthesiologists to begin with. As Roger Litwiller once said,...
