It was a Wednesday afternoon.  I was an intern on the pediatric surgery service at the busy county hospital.  I had arrived at work at 5am the previous day and we’d had a very busy night taking care of patients.I had not slept for 35 hours when the clerk in the clinic paged me. Struggling to keep my eyes open, I called the clinic. 

“There’s a mom here with her baby who missed their appointment this morning.”

I was furious. How dare she.  I was fuming, probably muttering to myself, as I walked down the dark stairwell to the clinic. I pulled out the chart and looked at it. 

A new patient. 

A long clinic visit. 

I was incredibly angry as I walked into the room.  I took a breath and pulled myself together to not be frankly rude as I said,  “I’m Dr. Brandt. I’m not sure why you are here now instead of 9am – which is when your appointment was?” 

She stood in front of me, holding the newborn I was about to see, two toddlers clinging to her legs, and looked at the floor. In a quiet voice she said, “We left our house at 6am. It took us three bus transfers to get here.”

It was my turn to look at the floor, humbled and ashamed. 

The Holy Family of the Streets by Kelly Lattimore

There is hardly a day that goes by that someone doesn’t push one or more of our buttons. Whether it’s a family who is angry (or late), an ER resident who calls and says “I know you are in a code, but we need a disposition…” or the nurse who is responding to an angry family and calls for the third time in an hour to see when you are coming…there are moments in our day that make us want to jump through the phone and strangle the person calling us. 

Don’t let anyone tell you you shouldn’t get mad. Anger and frustration are honest, human reactions to stressful situations and unreasonable requests. Yes, the person on the other end of the phone might be in a bad place… and it’s never wrong to give them a little grace… but sometimes they just don’t care or are being jerks.  But here’s the thing… it’s hard to control our emotional response to these moments but it’s not hard (if we practice) to control our reaction to those emotions. And as much as it’s the right thing to do, it’s also a practice that helps us. 

Viktor Frankl explains it like this:  “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” 

So here’s your practice for today. Watch for the space between your emotional reaction to an unreasonable request and your response. The next time it happens, see if you can make that space bigger. And then choose a response that reflects who you are (and want to become). 

*If you don’t know the story of Viktor Frankl, its worth learning. He graduated from medical school in 1931 and, like so many German Jewish doctors, he and his family were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. He survived, but his wife, parents, and brother did not. This is an experience that would break most of us beyond repair, but Viktor Frankl was able to find meaning and purpose in the midst of unthinkable horror. His most famous book is Man’s Search For Meaning, a book worth reading and rereading for all of us.