Monday, June 30, 2008

Gut Check--Take Care of Yourself!

On Sunday as we were driving home from NY, I had a real gut check--I received a call from work to inform me that one of my colleagues and friends had a heart attack earlier in the day. He was doing well and was in the hospital. He is younger than I am and in good health. It hit everyone I work with real hard on Monday. We are a pretty tight group.

Our jobs can be real high stress and are always fast paced. We often fail to take care of ourselves--and I'm not saying that he didn't, but in our business we really need to focus on stress relief and cardio conditioning to stay on top of the challenges we face every day. His experience is reinforcing that for everyone. I had one guy I used to paly racquetball with even get a court for the afternoon and we played for the first time in over a year.

I went and visited him in the hospital Monday evening and he is in good spirits. He said that he was real happy to be able to be talking to me. As it turned out--he was aware of the warning signs and didn't wait on getting to the hospital--good on him which is why he will have a quicker recovery. I, given the same circumstances would probably not have fared nearly so well, as my experience with my recently discovered shrimp allergy will attest.

Tim Russert's recent death has had a profound effect on many middle-aged men; hopefully for the better. His death and my friend's experience makes me face my own mortality, despite my best efforts to ignore it. I guess we each need to face our mortality, it is a humbling experience to know we don't control the number of days we are alloted. Live each day to the fullest and make sure you tell your loved ones how much they mean to you. It may be the words they need to get through the rest of their lives.

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