michaelboy (
michaelboy) wrote2025-02-09 09:11 pm
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Interchange of Magnetism

Last week I attended a volunteer orientation at Trinty Hospital for an upcoming position in the ER of a soon-to-be-completed neighborhood hospital. This facility, to be completed in July, will have ten ER beds, two OR's and I believe 6 ICU treatment rooms. When I lived in Pittsburgh, I volunteered for ten years in a twenty-five bed ER and absolutely loved it. I miss it immensely.
My regular career was first as an underground coal miner, then mining engineer turned IT manager at a consulting firm. I liked my job well enough and it certainly helped me enough to comfortablly leave it when I did, but I never loved it. It just never seemed to sufficiently define me. I need more and hope to make at least a small difference.
One of my all-time favorite humans was Walt Whitman. He willingly spent much of his time tending to the sick and dying during the Civil War. He understood that what he selfishly gained was way more than he gave and wrote these substantial words about it:
"I find deep things, unreckoned by current print or speech—
It is perhaps the greatest interchange of magnetism human relations are capable of."