Years ago, my wife and I visited Mackinac Island for a relaxing getaway. The trip was wonderful, but as we waited at the airport for our flight home, everything suddenly changed. My wife experienced a medical emergency and was rushed to the hospital by ambulance.
Thankfully, after receiving treatment, she was stable and resting in recovery. While she recuperated, I found myself at the nurse’s station using a hospital phone—this was before the age of smartphones—trying to reschedule our flight, find a place to stay for the night, and piece together a new plan. The final task was figuring out transportation to a hotel. That turned out to be more challenging than expected. There was only one local taxi service, run by a mother and son, and reaching them proved difficult. There was no such thing as Uber back then.
A nurse at the station, overhearing my many calls, kindly offered a solution. Her husband, also a nurse who happened to be off-duty and at home with their six-year-old son, could give us a ride.
Not long after, the father and son arrived to pick us up. Grateful for their help, I offered to buy them dinner as a thank-you. Over the meal, we got to know them better. They shared that they were originally from Canada, where both had worked in the Canadian healthcare system. But they had made the difficult decision to leave their home country and start over in the U.S. The reason? They’d grown frustrated with the working conditions and the quality of care they were able to provide within that system.
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