THE big glass bowl.

I have been coveting a large, glass bowl that usually lives in cardiac rehab downstairs. Those of you know me well and know my love of all things for entertaining and cooking are not surprised by my love for an object like this, however this is not just a normal clunky bowl. This particular bowl goes to live in the department that wins the quarterly customer satisfaction award. We send out a survey to a randomly selected group of patients and get compared to all the other outpatient departments that the hospital has. We keep getting really great scores but are edged out repeatedly by cardiac rehab.

It makes me nuts that we keep losing because the patients in cardiac rehab have just had a near death experience, are generally just happy to be alive, will do ANYTHING to avoid having another heart attack, and are just there to exercise in a pain-free process, drink coffee with their pals(because almost all of them are retired) and never get kicked to the curb because they can just keep coming forever as long as they pay $30 a month. My patients are generally in pain, have not had a life altering experience (read: not nearly as impressed with me and laid back in their approach) and think I have some sort of a magic wand that should heal them instead of hard work, sweat, swearing, and occasionally blood. They either get better super fast or stop getting better all together at which point we have to kick them out against their will generally. I wonder who would get the better satisfaction scores?

I digress. Needless to say the bowl has been something I have wanted since setting foot in Self Regional Healthcare nearly 2 years ago. I had basically given up hope and it had become a running joke between my boss and myself. We had discussed stealing it from cardiac rehab and holding it for ransom, actually beating up the cardiac rehab patients while dressed like cardiac rehab employees, and keying cars in the cardiac rehab parking lot...none seemed like a good, adult way of handling the situation. Then all the sudden last week I get a text from my boss that says "we won the bowl". Any normal person would find that odd, but it was the lilting voice of sweet triumph and "nanny nanny boo boo".

The bowl is usually presented at a big, quarterly meeting of all the managers and administration but as luck would have it(or wouldn't have it), they called off the meeting due to our layoffs and basically just chucked the bowl at my boss at the administration meeting. She told them we were going to take it to the local bar and fill it with beer...like the Stanley Cup. Everyone chuckled at how funny we were, but they don't get what we have been through to get the bowl. I won't get into all of it, but it has been a "pull yourself up by the bootstrap and dust off because there is a lot more shit to do before the sun goes down" kind of situation for sometime for us and there really isn't any light yet. This comes at a great time for us and I am really happy for everyone that works with me because it was a super effort under non-ideal circumstances.

So just know that late one evening, when the moon is high in the South Carolina sky, there is a high possibility that the shiny bowl may go missing ...and a high possibility there might be an incognito gathering at the Worcester's with the world's biggest margarita and a whole crap ton of bendy straws!