Waking this morning after a perfect night’s sleep in a soft bed in a dark quiet private room, I realized I needed to say this immediately: St. Mike’s may be a very old inner city hospital with lots of problems, but with me, they did their job extremely well. Despite the misfires, lack of communication chief among them, the fact is that I walked in there Monday afternoon very sick and in extreme pain. And I walked out of there on Wednesday afternoon filled with antibiotics and painkillers and very much on the road to recovery. 

It took them two days to choose and carry out the best possible solution for my medical issue. In all the chaos, a raft of nurses hooked me up to drips, kept them dripping, and made me better in two days. 

Today I’m going to spend time writing to people – to the kind nurses Eva and Gowri on the Gyn floor and especially to Julietta, whom I met for five minutes, fell in love with, and didn’t say goodbye to in my haste to escape. I need to say thank you to the kindest people on the planet. They will be too busy to read letters, but I will write them.

What I see today, thinking back, is professionals doing their jobs in the most difficult of situations – overcrowding, noise, decaying infrastructure, terrified sick people, and now pandemic, complications we can’t even imagine. I may laugh at it, but somehow, in a hospital with thousands of patients, that late breakfast tray was ordered and arrived for me. It was not pretty, but it arrived. That’s the miracle. I could not see it at the time, but now I see that ridiculous egg as a symbol of something extraordinary: a world of people at work to make their patients better. 

To be home and not sick and in pain matters most in the world, my friends. If that is where and how you are, give thanks.