Youre Stressing Me Out Kristine Thornton Sou Essays

Youre Stressing Me Out Kristine Thornton Southern Technical College Dr. Andrea Goldstein Every day there are events going on around me that add to my daily accumulation of stress. Mostly this doesn't bother me too much. Traffic stresses me out when I'm in a hurry, which is every morning. My kids stress me out with their constant neediness. School stresses me out with its constant demands and deadlines. But the thing that stresses me out the most is chronic lateness. Not by me - I'm rarely late - but by my employer. My employer is a surgeon and he is late to work every single day by at least 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes more. Occasionally he has surgery at the hospital before office hours (rarely) and I can understand how that can run late, but more often than not, it is for no reason at all. Now, I understand he is a very busy man. He is not only a surgeon, but he is a County Commissioner and the Presi dent of the Florida Society of Plastic Surgeons, Chief of Surgery at the hospital, board member of the Charlotte County Orchestra, Director of the Charlotte Players, and many other extracurricular activities. Recently he became a guest speaker at Southern Technical College for the Surgical Technician program and is now working with the Port Charlotte director of that program and donating his time to the surgical technicians once a month. My employer is an amazing human being who is constantly, selflessly giving of himself, and when I look at him from that perspective, I see that he is not late to work because he is lazy and doesn't want to get out of bed on time, it is because he is so mentally and physically exhausted from all the energy he gives to other people and other causes. When he finally does show up to the office, my irritation and anxiety immediately disappears. I start rooming the patients and they are not angry at all. My anxiety is all for nothing. I worry that the patients will get angry for the long wait and storm out and go find a different doctor. But those who have been coming to him for a long time know that he will probably be late, they expect it, and they also know that he will spend as much time with them as they need and give them the very best care possible, and he is compassionate and truly cares about each and every one of them. I see this every day as I work as his medical assistant, and I don't think I can ever quit working for him. There's a cycle of anxiety, stress, then a change of perspective, then understanding, respect and acceptance. This is almost a daily occurrence. My grandparents traveled west by horse and buggy from Missouri to Utah. Yes, they were Mormons. They had no running water, no electricity, and had to hunt deer and elk for their meat. Utah is a desert, so establishing a town and a home and trying to survive was quite challenging. I would think that for women, especially, life would be very str essful during that time. Hygiene would be difficult. Raising babies and children would be stressful - if they were lucky enough to even survive. Winters are long and harsh in Utah. And yet I remember conversations with my grandmother describing these times in her life, the adventures she went on and how exciting life was. They didn't have television, internet, and electricity, running water or telephones. She spoke about life back then with fond memories of family, and how close they were. How self-reliant everyone had to be. How tough everyone had to be. It was just the way things were and it didn't seem unusually stressful to her at all. Now I think about how things are today with all of our conveniences. We all have electricity in this country, running water, telephones; most of us have cell phones, internet, television, cars, and grocery stores on every corner. Life today is about convenience. But we have a whole new set of stressors that did not exist in the 1930s. We now have