A Devotion

Not like TV

Have you ever watched a TV program or movie that includes something in which you are the expert? Do you ever say – it doesn't really happen like that? I have caught myself doing that quite often. Maybe you race cars, or ride horses. Maybe you are a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, a policeman. Maybe you are a teacher, a construction worker. It doesn't matter. Hollywood seems to take artistic license with things for dramatic appeal.

I remember after having my first child, I would watch a childbirth segment on TV or in the movies and sneer – it really doesn't happen like that. Mine was just like they say its supposed to happen in the textbooks – it takes several hours and you are a sweaty, painful and exhausted (yet ecstatic) mess when it is over. There is none of this casually walking through the mall when suddenly you are seized by a contraction that doubles you over only to be rushed to the hospital in the nick of time. I mean, I knew better because my experience was WAY different. It was way different, that is, until I had my second child. She came – well, like it happens in the movies. I was wakened from a dead sleep at 4:30 in the morning by a pain tearing through my abdomen. When, after 30 minutes I called the doctor, went into the hospital and the nurse panicked because the doctor wasn't there yet and she really didn't want to deliver the baby. So – maybe it DOES sometimes happen like on TV.

I have worked the last year in health care, and I have come across a few things that are significantly different than the way that it happens on TV. One of the things I have witnessed more times than I care is medical staff performing CPR on a patient. I can state from experience that most depictions of CPR on the big or small screen are quite different than when they are done when a patient's life hangs in the balance. The outcomes compared to their artistic depictions are almost always different. If the patient is revived they are usually transferred to an ICU and almost always they are breathing with a ventilator. They are kept sedated for a significant period of time to give their bodies time to heal and recover from whatever caused the cardiac arrest and the after effects of the brutal and violent resuscitation attempt. I say all that, and just when I get all sure that its one way, well, I get thrown a loop again. I have witnessed one patient who "woke up" about the time that they were getting ready to perform CPR. They had discovered no pulse or blood pressure, so the nurse called the code and 4 of them quickly transferred the patient from the chair to the bed. About the time that they got the bed positioned to do CPR, the patient just "woke up." Then they canceled the code. Nobody knows why she quit breathing and her heart stopped.

Jesus said, "Why do you look at the sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank that is in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3, NIV) I think that it merits knowing whether or not we are looking at our belief in things through the eyes of an "expert" or simply the eyes of our own experience. Are we looking through the sawdust, or do we need to be paying attention to the plank?