Hello, dear one!
Have you ever received a sizable check from a neighbor unexpectedly? Well, I have. I had no idea that my critical thinking would have earned me a surprise gift.
Like any normal day, after I picked up my mail in the mailbox, I flipped through a pile of newspaper ads, donation solicitation letters, and a few regular bills. Suddenly, my eyes fell on a fuchsia card envelope.
It was from my diseased neighbor’s daughter.
Out of curiosity, I quickly opened the handwritten card, and my heart stopped when I saw a four-digit check!
In her card, the daughter wrote, “After Mother passed away, I thought of many people who had touched her life, and you were her angel from another world.
Because you went the extra mile to educate me and my brother, we were able to take the blood thinner off Mother’s medication list, which kept her safe at home and enabled her to live freely for almost ten years.
Please accept this gift from us as our gratitude for loving Mother.”
The check was unusual, but the situation could be found in any neighborhood.
My late neighbor was in her late 70s and lived alone. Her husband passed away a few years ago. Because of a heart condition, her cardiologist prescribed a common blood thinner that required her for blood tests twice weekly.
Since she was not homebound, Medicare would not pay for lab visits at her home.
Every time the test result came out, the pharmacist would call and adjust the dosage of the blood thinner and give her new instructions until the next blood test.
In addition, there was a food restriction. She loved spinach, but she had to constantly watch the amount she ingested.
She complained to me, “I feel like a slave to my meds.”
I became increasingly concerned about her quality of life and home safety. The adverse reaction to this blood thinner was internal bleeding, and that was why she was closely monitored weekly.
What if she started bleeding internally and experiencing blurred vision, lightheadedness, shortness of breath, or falling? She lived alone!
As a nurse, I was supposed to follow doctors’ orders, but my critical thinking killed in. Our job is always to not harm the public. There had to be a better way!
Through many hours of researching this blood thinner, I concluded that it was not appropriate for my neighbor, and it could be safely replaced by baby aspirin.
I called her daughter and met her multiple times discussing my concern in detail. Touched by my passion and genuine care for her mother, she made an appointment with the cardiologist who had prescribed the blood thinner.
The meeting went south.
The cardiologist insisted that it was standard practice for her medical diagnosis, and he refused to take off the blood thinner.
When the daughter visited me, defeated and discouraged, I asked her, “Who’s health is this, your mother’s or his? Is this the only cardiologist in the area?”
Six weeks later and after four different cardiologists. the daughter found a perfect match for her mother. The new cardiologist listened intently and agreed to baby aspirin; she stayed with my neighbor until her final days.
For almost ten years, my neighbor freed herself from running to the lab twice a week for blood tests; she traded her lab time for senior dancing. As for her diet, she was thrilled to eat her favorite spinach any time and in any amount.
I was raised as a submissive order taker, not a critical thinker which requires thinking with a reasoned judgment. It’s easier but not necessarily safer to follow orders when being told.
Out of all job tasks, I’ve found thinking on your own to be the most challenging as Henry Ford put it,
“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.”
In my years of patient care, I’ve noticed a common trend among medical professionals, especially the ones with more schooling, titles, and certificates. They don’t treat each patient as an individual, rather, they follow a “proven treatment plan”.
However, there is a danger in following one practice of treating all.
Ecologist Allan Savory had long warned us regarding the academic influence,
“People are coming out of the university with a master’s degree or a Ph.D., and you take them to the field, they literally don’t believe anything unless it’s a peer-reviewed paper.
If you say to them, let’s observe and let’s discuss, they don’t do it…If the paper is peer-reviewed, it means everybody thought the same, and therefore they approved it…”
He shook his head and concluded,
“We are going to kill ourselves because of stupidity.”
Savory’s remarks were excruciating, but there was truth in pain. What if the medical system was designed as a controlled profit center? What if my academic education was programmed to train me as a walking zombie? What if saving lives was meant to kill?
My neighbor’s original cardiologist swore by the standard practice, but was it right to risk her life at home? Which one was more precious, the practice or life?
My critical thinking ultimately contributed to the quality of my neighbor’s remaining life, and it also surprised me with an unexpected gift, years later.
Now, are you aware critical thinking is the most talked about skill among the recent online career posts? It’s considered the skill for your future!
We’re entering an era of artificial intelligence and unscrupulous corporate competition. How do you stand out as a human success?
You can choose to react to the “unjust competition,” or create a new identity with critical thinking to solve a complex problem.
If you look at the words “create” and “react,” do the spellings look almost identical? The good news is that the energy you exert to react is the same energy you can create. So get good at critical thinking!
The more you practice critical thinking, the more you’ll connect all external dots and remain unshakable inside.
And remember this: God called you the kings and queens of the King. Hmm, not slaves?