On a day...

On a day when soo many who have died are remembered, I'd like to write about the times lives have been saved. Not to discount the enormity of 9-11, but to also focus on life, living.

-When I was a 4 year old my aunt Jeanie saved me from drowning in my grandma's swimming pool. Later my mom would save one of her kids from the same fate.

-I was in a restaurant with family for a wedding celebration dinner when my sister in-law TrackStar stands up, yelling "someone help my baby!" At this point I stand up and ask what is wrong and she throws my infant nephew to me. He wasn't breathing, just open mouth gaping. I flip him over and give him baby Heimlich maneuver and up comes the food he was choking on.

The buzz lasted for hours and I felt that if I never did anything good again in life or died that night, I had served a good purpose just once for someone else.

-One of my patients was slipping into a diabetic coman, and worse during the initial part of a PET scan. No one else was there to help me or tell me what to do, but as I saw his heart rate drop into the 20's and his blood pressure fall to 68/40 I acted. I followed the protocol for this situation (which I don't even remember now) and the patient recovered, lived and had no ill effect or even memory of how close they came to death.

-I was hiking in the Sierra Nevada mountains in November with my then girlfriend. We were walking along tall rocks near an ice and snow covered stream when she slipped and fell into the moving water. I was able to move across the rocks to catch her and pull her from the stream. Completely soaked in below freezing temperatures, 4 miles from my truck, in winter.

She had brought no spare clothes and didn't want to move. It began to snow. I stripped off the clothes I was wearing and took hers off. I put my warmed clothes on her. I put the just barely enough spare clothes I had in my pack and threw her wet clothes in the pack. With dry clothes on it was time to get her out of the weather.

With cajoling, pushing and prodding I got us back to the truck before dark. I didn't have any food in the truck so I had no calories to put in her, but I got her home and into a warm bath and drinking warm drinks with lots of fat and calories.

All men die, but not all men live.

Live.