December 13, 2024
It’s been a week...
Hoo boy, has it been a week.
After four days of delirium, wildly fluctuating body temperatures, and a series of dreams that would have freaked out David Lynch, I gave in and went to the ER.
I should have gone a day or two earlier, but I felt so crappy that the idea of sitting for hours in a fluorescently lit waiting room crowded with contagious people seemed like a worse idea than continuing to white-knuckle it in my basement.
As it turned out, my fears were misplaced. The ER experience was fabulous. The waiting room was lit like a fancy restaurant, there was only one other patient waiting, and he was suffering from a dog bite, which, in my experience, isn’t particularly contagious.
They took me (and “dog bite” guy) in after waiting only ten minutes or so. The next hour featured a rotating cast of doctors and nurses who took my blood, checked my oxygen levels, did a series of X-rays, and generally poked, prodded, listened, and looked at stuff.
After being there maybe an hour, the main doctor came in with my diagnosis:
“You have pneumonia.”
She delivered the news in grave tones and with apologetic body language, like I would be devastated by the news, but in my head, I was thinking:
“Pneumonia? That’s great!”
I’ve never had pneumonia before, so my reaction might have been naive, but surely it had to be better than all the farfetched possibilities that I’d been imagining in my fever dreams.
I mean... pneumonia. I’ve totally heard of that. It’s been around forever. There must be a dozen proven treatments. It was somehow comforting knowing it was pneumonia.
Or maybe...
Or maybe the comforting part was just the knowing.
Here’s the thing...
When a novel issue crops up - health, personal, business, whatever - not knowing the cause is fine if the stakes are low or it goes away quickly.
But if the stakes are high and it’s not going away, then not knowing the cause can really start to eat away at you.
The longer the issue lasts, the more time, money, and energy you’ll waste on remedies that are suboptimal at best and completely ineffective at worst.
So what do you do?
You do what I should have done days earlier...
Call an expert.
Having a trusted expert tell you in clear terms what the root cause of your issue is can be super valuable, even though they haven’t “done” anything in the “manual labor” sense.
Why?
Because they have narrowed down the solution space from NEAR INFINITY to KNOWN PATH.
You still have to walk down the path, and it might be a long, tough one without a guaranteed outcome, but at least you’ll be confident that you’re not wasting precious resources on the nearly endless alternative paths that definitely won’t get you where you want to go.
PSA: Never try to break up a dogfight. I know you love your dog, but I promise... you love your hand more.
Yours,
—J