Life is a continuous ebb and flow. It is a coin with two sides; it is about giving and receiving.
Recently, I lived through an experience – truly a miracle – that taught me so much and left my heart overflowing with gratitude.
By destiny or by chance, on the morning of Wednesday, 18 March, I conducted a training session for the EMS team in Araraquara, a city that happens to be home to a multiple award-winning Angels hospital.
Early that same evening, as I was on my way to deliver another training, I was involved in a serious car accident on the Washington Luiz Highway. According to a news report on the accident a few days later, the accident had been caused by a driverless vehicle in the course of an attempted robbery.
In the moment of impact, I shifted from being a trainer to becoming a patient. Life made itself present, reminding me that we reap what we sow.
So much care. So much attention. That is what I received from the EMS professionals.
I was between two cities – São Carlos and Araraquara, in the state of São Paulo, both with Angels Hospitals.
In fact, São Carlos was recognized last year as an Angels City. And the hospital where I was treated, Hospital São Paulo Unimed Araraquara, has earned numerous Angels Awards. Registered since 2021, it remains among the top five hospitals in Brazil with the most awards – 20 in total, including 10 consecutive diamonds.
As I waited to be seen, now in the unfamiliar role of ‘patient’, I reflected on how reassuring it was to know that you were receiving excellent care, when the professionals around you were skilled and prepared.
I imagined the situation of patients arriving with strokes, and the numbers of lives saved and families reunited because there is a structured stroke protocol in place, because the Angels Initiative has passed through there.
To feel vulnerable as a patient is painful, sometimes even lonely. In that moment, a film played in my mind of the immense value of life, and the way God had extended His hand to spare me from something worse.
At the same time, I had the chance to feel the good that comes from the work of Angels – the friendships, the people we meet who are, quite literally, the embodiment of angels in my life.
Being part of the Angels Initiative is something powerful, something profound. It means knowing, in practice, what the legacy looks like that we leave wherever we go.
To close, I share part of a poem by Brazilian writer João Guimarães Rosa:
“The course of life wraps everything, life is like this: it heats and cools, tightens and then loosens, calms and then unsettles. What it asks of us is courage.”
Courage to face our difficulties, and courage to know that everything we do here has a grand and lasting impact.
