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When people ask my wife what she does, sometimes she jokes and says she saves lives. The reality is, she delivers babies, and helps in the process of bringing new life into this world.

A few days ago she came home as I was waking up to go to work and seemed sad. When I asked her why she was sad she told me how a woman came into San Francisco General Hospital complaining of something or another. However, after running some tests, my wife was perplexed as to the results. A few folks wanted to just send her home, thinking she was fine. However, Lora insisted that she stay under observation.

Now, for some framework. San Francisco General is the city county hospital located in the Mission District. It by no means caters to affluent folks, or people who are typically insured. My wife sees a lot of “interesting” things. It’s also San Francisco’s only trauma center. So if you get shot 10 miles away, you are in for a long ambulance ride.

Anyway, what Lora found out was that the patient’s baby was dead, and no one knew how long. When a baby dies, and you don’t evacuate it, it starts to release deadly toxins into the body that will eventually kill you. This person was very close to death. Lora arranged for a late night surgery and the patent is now in the Intensive Care Unit recovering. This is a decision that was entirely her call, no one was there to help her make this choice.

What would have happened had they sent her home? I don’t even know if she had a home.

Why am I writing about this? Sometimes I think my job is so hard, and that the decisions at work that I have to make are so difficult. I get paid quite a bit of money (substantially more than my wife) to make software. It’s entirely possible that the software I work on somehow saves lives. However, the decisions I make on a daily basis do not.

If anything I’m grateful that there are people like Lora willing to make such sacrifices to make decisions that I can never make, and have a truly profound impact on one’s life.