The ocean had always been able to do something no doctor, therapist, vacation brochure, or expensive bottle of wine had ever managed to do for me. The moment I turned onto Shoreline Drive and caught that first glimpse of gray-blue water beyond the dunes, something inside me usually loosened. My shoulders dropped. My breathing slowed. The endless lists running through my head became quieter.
That Friday afternoon, after one of the most exhausting years of my career, I needed that feeling more than ever.
I was sixty-two years old and had spent the better part of three decades working in medical administration. For the last eleven years, I had managed operations at a busy community clinic in the city, which meant I was responsible for everything nobody else wanted responsibility for. Scheduling problems, insurance disputes, angry patients, doctors who believed calendars were optional, nurses calling out sick, vendors who forgot deliveries, broken air-conditioning systems, payroll questions, and the occasional plumbing disaster all seemed to find their way to my office, usually arriving in clusters, usually on the same miserable Tuesday.
By the time summer arrived, I was tired in a way sleep could not completely fix. I’d started noticing it in small ways — forgetting the name of a patient I’d spoken with three times that week, snapping at a vendor over a missed delivery in a tone I didn’t recognize as my own, sitting in my car in the clinic parking lot for ten minutes after my shift ended because I couldn’t quite make myself turn the key.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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