BLINK OF AN EYE: Embracing Change
 By CJ Lyons

Change happens.  We can't live without it.  Some change is cataclysmic–the loss of a loved one, a terrible illness.  These kind of changes trigger a grieving process in most people, following fairly well-studied patterns of anger, denial, acceptance, resolution.

Other changes are gradual, you might not even see their effect until years later.  Sometimes it's for the best, sometimes the worse.  Change happens–what can we do about it?

How we deal with change depends not only on our personality but also on our recognition of the types of change influencing our lives.  Most of us shrug and experience these more subtle changes as if we're riding a current, out of our control and at the whim of fate or destiny.

We can't control most of what happens in this world.  That's true.  But, if we decide to acknowledge the world influencing us, decide to get involved and actively participate, then we can determine how change affects our lives instead of merely riding the wave.

My years of practicing medicine have shown me that most of the time, we ignore our own power to influence the events that make up our lives, our futures.  Often we don't pay attention to why things are happening.  Or we refuse to find the courage to get involved and make a difference.  Why?

Because it's not easy to open our eyes and take a hard look at the role our own actions might have had, especially when we're in the midst of turmoil.  Whether change is good or bad, it is always chaotic, disruptive.  Finding the strength to wade into that chaos and try to take control–not knowing if you'll be making things better or worse–that's not easy for most of us.  So much simpler to just sit back and see where current events take us.

Want to get out of the water and back on dry land, back in control of your life?  To start, let me share with you the first rule of emergency medicine: prepare for the worst, hope for the best.  No one can ever be certain of the outcome of anything.  Even good things like marriage can end in disaster.  We say, "who knows why, it just happened".

Nothing just happens.  In BLINK OF AN EYE, my medical thriller, my main character, Dr. Cassandra Hart is an emergency room physician.  She's smart, a hard worker, a self-admitted control freak.  She's also a victim of domestic violence.  What?  How could a physician let something like that happen?

She met her husband and it was a fairy-tale romance.  Their first date he hired a yacht, bought her a ball gown that rivaled Cinderella's, took her sailing and dancing under the moonlight.  It was a dream come true for a working class girl who'd lost both her parents by the time she was twelve, who had never been the center of anyone's universe before.  No one made Cassie feel like he did.  So they married.  And he began to ask when she'd be home from the ER, he began to take her out to visit his friends and family, he began to take charge of the house, the money, what they did in their spare time.  He introduced Cassie to a new world that he was the center of.  And Cassie waltzed right into it–after all, his world was the world of fairytales, where dreams came true.  He was her Prince Charming, she was his Cinderella.

Happily ever after, right?  Sorry.  Even though I have strong relationships in my books, there's no guaranteed happily ever after for anyone.  So here's this very smart, tough, independent ER doc drawn into this relationship, thinking this is how life should be.  Maybe her husband is a bit controlling–it's because he loves her, worries about her, wants to spend every minute with her.  There's nothing wrong with that, right?  Maybe he drinks too much, maybe he's misusing prescription drugs–it might even be her fault, she's a doctor, she should have seen the signs, paid more attention to him, gotten him help.  

Then one night she takes control of one small thing–she asks him for the car keys after they've been out with his family and he drank too much.  He gives them to her with a frosty smile and as soon as they're home he beats the crap out of her.

She didn't ask for this, but neither was this change totally unpredictable–at least not for us Monday morning quarterbacks.  This type of insidious change is what I call catalystic change.  It's the kind of thing where we wake up one morning, look back on our lives and say, to borrow from the Talking Heads, "this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, my god what have I done!"

This is the hardest kind of change to overcome because it is so insidious.  Breaking away from established patterns, moving out of our comfort zone–that's hard work.  How to do it?

In the ER, whenever there's a major trauma or a code, we have protocols we follow.  Everything goes back to the ABC's: airway, breathing, circulation.  Makes sense, right?  No airway means no oxygen to the lungs, no breathing means no oxygen to the brain, so no good rushing to jump start a heart if you're not sending any oxygen to the brain.  No oxygen equals no brain left.

No matter what's going on, no matter how many alarms are screaming for attention, blood spurting, guts hanging out, we stop and go back to the ABC's.  Over and over again.  We know what we want to happen–we want the patient's heart to start beating again.  But we also have priorities, know that just starting the heart isn't enough, we have to have an airway and get the lungs breathing again in order to bring back the person.

Let's work out some ABC's to deal with change.  First Awareness.  Acknowledge that undercurrent of dissatisfaction making you grind your teeth every time you go to work or see your wife or look in the mirror.  Analyze it.  Trace back the steps–maybe years or decades to the time when the change began.  Don't think "where did I go wrong?"  Instead look for what triggered the change–was it your choice?  Or did you just go along with the flow?  Change is like a ripple effect.  Often what other people are doing, splashing around, making changes in their own lives, creates an impact on us.  It can be as obvious as a tsunami or as subtle as a rip tide that carries us out to sea before we know it.

The point is, it's not the other people affected by the ripples they create.  It's us.  We're changed because of their actions.  The definition of a catalyst is a chemical that effects a reaction between other chemicals but is itself unchanged during the process.  We're all catalysts for each other.

Step two in dealing with change.  Breathe.  You heard me.  Breathe in, breathe out.  Don't flounder or struggle or waste your energy.  Breathe.  Know what the first rule of a code is?  When you run in, find a patient in cardiac arrest: find your own pulse.  You're still alive.  Take a moment to step back, look at where you are and where you want to be.  What do you want to have happen.

Remember the ABC's I just told you about?  It's not good enough to merely bring the heart back.  Science has lots of tricks to make a heart beat again.  But we're trying to save a life not just a body part.

So when you're caught in that riptide, stop, breathe.  What are your priorities?  Whose life are you trying to live?  Look at the big picture, not just the raise you're aiming for or the new car you want.  Who do you want to be?  How does that impact your family?  What's it going to take for you to break free?  What's it going to cost you and your loved ones?

You have the answers.  You might not like them, and they might be hard to find.  Some of us are extroverts.  We find energy in being with others.  We'll join groups, gather people around us, borrow their ideas, their examples, their energy to help us decide on a course of action.

The rest of us are introverts.  We like people, but we get our energy, recharge our batteries, when we're alone.  We might still join groups, ask for advice, gather our friends around us for support.  But then we'll isolate ourselves, meditate, sift through our options and make a choice.

Choosing a course of action.  That's the third step to overcoming change.  More than making a choice, it's finding the courage to make it happen.  I'm not talking about John Wayne bravado here.  I'm talking about real courage, knowing your fears and facing them.

This is where most people falter.  Not because they're cowards, but because they don't know where to look for courage.  We've been conditioned to believe that courage comes from outside–from a bottle, a pill, from following a moviestar's example, from doing what someone else like Dear Abby tells you to do.

Not so.  In the first scene of BLINK OF AN EYE, Cassie, my ER doc, is cold, sweaty, trying hard not to vomit.  She's in a helicopter flying through rough weather to rescue a Jane Doe–a kid who doesn't even have a name.  Cassie isn't air sick.  She's scared spitless—literally.  Not only is she fighting claustrophobia but the weather turns and their routine flight is suddenly turned into a death trap.  The pilot asks her if she wants to turn back.  Send an ambulance instead.

Wants to turn back?  Of course she wants to turn back!  Right now the helicopter pad back at the hospital is the closest thing to heaven that Cassie knows.  She's desperate to turn back.

What does she tell the pilot?  She gulps, takes a breath, finds her voice.  And tells him no.  They can't turn back, an ambulance might take too long, her Jane Doe could die.

Where does Cassie find the courage to face her fears?  It wasn't from watching Fear Factor, that's for sure.  She got it from the same place you and I do.  All courage comes from love.  Not necessarily romantic love, but passion.  Where's the passion in your life?  What affects you so deeply that you'd risk everything for it?  Is it your family, your husband or wife, a cause, an artistic goal?  What do you dream about–not the preprogrammed daydreams that society has instilled in us by repeated exposures and Madison Avenue brainwashing.  C'mon, how many of us really, passionately dream about buying a Hummer or living like Paris Hilton?

When choosing a course of action, tap into your passions.  Passion?  I don't have any passion, you say.  Do Monday night football and Ghiradelli chocolate count?

No.  And yes, you do have passions.  They might be buried under layers of anxiety and insecurity and the expectations of others.  Including all those marketing experts trying to tell us what we want and then sell it to us for only 19.95 a month!

When I'm trying to find my characters' passions, I look to their fears. What are they most afraid of losing?  In Cassie's case, it's control, hence her claustrophobia.  It's born not from a fear of small spaces but out of a fear of not being in control.  That's how she found the courage to leave her husband and start over.  She realized it wasn't her husband who had changed during their relationship.  He's the catalyst, he's the same as he ever was.  But she has allowed him to change her.  She knows she's responsible for her own life yet she's allowed someone else to slowly, gradually, insidiously take control.  She vows never to let that happen again.

Her greatest fear, losing control, sparks her passion, helps her find the courage to regain control, to walk away.  

What are you most afraid of losing?  What keeps you awake at night?  Money worries? Maybe security is your passion.  You might need to find the courage to say enough is enough, I really don't need to buy any more stuff, what I need is to go back to basics, pay my bills, simplify my life, get back on track.

Or maybe it's feelings of doubt about how attractive you are to others.  Find your passion by not only starting to take care of yourself, body and mind, but also by becoming attractive to yourself first.  Find something that brings you joy, that you throw yourself into with gusto.  Doing the crossword puzzle in pen, painting, gardening, photography, poetry.  Then share it with others.  People are drawn to enthusiasm and attitude more than appearances.

If you're an extrovert, go out with the people you respect and admire most, people you think are heros.  Ask them what drove them to do the things you only dream of doing.  If you're an introvert, go to the library, find those great books that make you sigh at the end, make you think you wish you could do that and think about why and how the hero accomplished his goat.  Research, read biographies, meditate, brainstorm, plan.
People often ask me why I became a pediatric emergency medicine physician.  All those terribly sick and injured kids, child abuse cases, rapes–who would want to face that everyday?

Here's my answer.  I hate bullies.  All my life.  Can't stand them.  So for me, being on the front lines either in the ER or in private practice or through the characters in my books is my way of standing up for the little guy, for the kids who have no voice or power.  It's what I'm passionate about–and it's what drives most of my characters as well.  They need to get involved, make a difference.  It's their passion.  It's Cassie's love of her job, of taking care of her patients, standing for them, that gives her the courage to face almost anything.

Ask yourself.  Where's your passion?

Change can be overwhelming at times.  But through becoming aware of the causes of change and acknowledging your role in them, by taking time to breathe and gather your strengths, your support system around you and by choosing to regain control of events, you'll be able to use change to your advantage.

I can guarantee you there will be surprises, good and bad, along the way, but when you decide to make a change and you find the courage to do it, your life will be different.  You'll know that whatever happens, you have control over this thing that once was your greatest fear but now becomes an asset, a driving passion.

Go ahead.  Take the plunge.  Find the courage to get involved with your own life and make some ripples, make a splash or two.

Once you start changing your life, you'll suddenly find your example of courage making an impact on someone else.  People will be talking to you, asking you how you did it, how you found the strength, the courage, the wisdom.

And you'll realize that it doesn't matter whether you actually make that dream a reality, because you lived your life with courage guided by your passion, your love.  You've gone from a victim trapped in a riptide out of your control to a hero making a difference, having an impact on others' lives.

That's when the happily ever after begins....

CJ Lyons is a physician trained in Pediatric Emergency Medicine.  She has assisted police and prosecutors with cases involving child abuse, rape, homicide and Munchausen by Proxy and has worked in numerous trauma centers, on the Navajo reservation, as a crisis counselor, victim advocate, as well as a flight physician for Life Flight and Stat Medevac. Her medical thriller, BLINK OF AN EYE, will be published by Tor Books, summer 2006.  Contact her at 

copyright CJ Lyons, 2005, all rights reserved