Meaning

It's a rainy Saturday morning, and I finished seeing my patients before 10 a.m. After locating the bus route on Google Map, I checked the documents and headed to the bank. I told myself I had to get there within office hours. In many ways, the efforts to squeeze time settling bank account signature issues is even more daunting than the fight to see my patients. I can see patients as long as the wards do not having official opening hours, adding whatever number of hours I wish in an already jam-packed day.

After standing at the bus stop for another 30 minutes, I decided to give up waiting and took a taxi.

No sooner did I get off the taxi than my phone rang. That's a call from my colleague who'd arrived at the bank. "The bank service for our business won't be available on weekend." Which, if you think about it - and I did - could have been sort of frustrating.

Were things really so bad? Not really. I didn't use any curse words. That's bad luck - or, at best, a hiccup. It isn't considered the best use of time. But it isn't the worst, either. I headed back to the hospital, and made good use of the travel time to finish Dr. Paul Kalanithi's memoir When Breath Becomes Air. My somewhat bad luck paled against that of the young neurosurgeon who flipped through the CT scan images of lung cancer, spreading to liver, spine, everywhere - and that was his own film.

A meaningful lesson on a Saturday morning.