Being Prepared

I was originally planning on talking about being prepared in the military sense. Having backup plans for when plan A goes wrong. The last, almost, two weeks has thrown me a huge curveball though and it gave me a crash course in being prepared.

On September 1st, my wife was admitted to the hospital. Shortly after arriving at the hospital she began having seizures. This was a first for her, and a first for me. I had no idea what was going on, and now all of a sudden I was thrown into an Emergency Room waiting room torn between watching my children who just witnessed a relatively traumatic event and being with my wife who couldn’t even speak for herself.

In that moment, I realized I was completely unprepared for what was going on. Even when doctors were asking me questions about my wife, I struggled to come up with answers to many of them. I drew a complete blank on the family medical history on her side. Medications and allergies, I only had partial answers.

The thing is, I know these answers. In the heat of the moment, though, I couldn’t recall them.

Getting Prepared

I took stock of my family’s emergency preparedness, and realized we had done a shitty job at preparing ourselves for this. I’ll own it – I know better than that.

One day last week I decided to sit down with my kids and asked them “how would you get help if Daddy fell down right now and couldn’t wake up”? They said they’d call their grandparents, which is an OK answer but it’s also something they’ve never actually done on their own before. So I handed my oldest son my smartphone and said “go ahead, call them”. He couldn’t even unlock the phone, and there was absolutely zero pressure to do so. He wouldn’t stand a chance in a stressful situation.

I realized that between my wife, the grandparents, and myself there are four different smartphone models that our kids would have to learn how to unlock and how to dial 911 with. This needed to be simpler. I’ve already simplified this for my kids by getting a super basic 1999 style phone.

We’re also compiling all of our medical information into an easy to grab packet that can be given to EMT’s, doctors, nurses, etc. It’ll have medical history, allergies, and anything else that could be relevant in an emergency.

Takeaways on Being Prepared

You can’t plan for everything. I get that.

What you could do, is think about the top 5 or 10 worst things that could happen to you, your family, your business, or all of the above. What a downer, I know. In my case, one of the things that would top any of those lists would be my wife becoming hospitalized. The things I might need to plan for include:

Medical expenses (oh man will this be expensive)
Time off from work – who is going to pick up the slack when I’m away? (I’ve taken a lot of time off)
Child care – who’s looking after the little ones when dad is visiting mom in the hospital?
Lifestyle changes – will we be able to return to business as usual when this is all over? Unfortunately, we’ve come to find out the answer to that is no.

Everyone’s situation is different. If you plan for some of the more significant issues that could come up, you will find yourself less stressed and more able to “roll with the punches” as the saying goes.

I had originally planned on talking this week about a topic along the lines of being prepared. And you might think of being prepared as having backup plans, contingency plans, that type of thing. And while that’s all well and good, an event happened, a personal family medical issue which was rather severe and significant. Kind of changed what I wanted to talk about and talk about a more personal story here. And I think as entrepreneurs who might be watching this, you might be able to relate to this because a lot of us we work for ourselves and we have our families that rely on what we’re doing, and so you might be able to relate to this story. So at the beginning of this month, on September 1st, my wife started having some issues at home. I won’t get into the details or whatever, so we ended up going to the emergency room. When we got the emergency room, she started having seizures. This was a first for her, she’s never had seizures before and was a huge shock to me. And I didn’t know what to expect. I knew nothing really about seizures, I never knew anyone who had them or anything like that and so it was a real big shock to me. I was completely unprepared. Doctors were asking me all sorts of questions. “What kind of medications is she on?” and “Does she have any allergies?” all this family medical history, things like that. I was completely unprepared to answer most of those questions. I knew some of the answers, but only partially. I knew what medication she was on, but I didn’t know what the doses were or things like that. And other questions that they were asking me, I just, I wasn’t prepared. I know that makes me seem like it’s terrible, like you should just know these things. And you’re right, I should know these things, but I was unprepared. So looking at my own personal life, I have to kind of do an assessment of what else do I not know off the top of my head without having to look up this information that I can’t recall real quickly. What else do I not know? I should probably organize this information. I should probably have a list of all of my wife’s medications that she might be taking. I should have a list of any allergies that anybody in our family has, including my parents and in-laws and other relatives that might be around, because I might be put in that position where I might have to be providing this information, not just for my wife but for any number of other people. To kind of bring it back full circle, to be more a little bit on topic in a business-related context, what are some things that you’re unprepared for? Think about absolute worst case disaster scenarios that you’re not prepared for, you don’t have the answers for. Or if you do have the answers, it would take too long for it to be relevant for you to get those answers for whatever the problem is. Go through your business and assess what would be a catastrophic event to our business if this happened today? What would put us under? What would cause significant financial troubles, cash flow or otherwise to the business if this, whatever this event is, that happened? And come up with a contingency plan. Put down some information if it’s needing to have information at hand, get that information, put it somewhere. Put it in a folder, a binder, a folder in Dropbox, or something and make sure that everybody who needs to know knows where this stuff is. Planning for medical emergencies is something that I never really thought of at our age. I mean, my wife is in her thirties, very active, very fit and gets out and runs and does all this stuff. Never in a million years would I think that I’d have to take her to the hospital for something like this that could potentially have sidelined all of that with what the diagnosis could have ended up being. Fortunately, I think we’re going to be okay. Doctors are still running their tests and doing their thing but it was a completely huge eye-opener for me and it’s something that I never want to have happen again, in business, personal life, or otherwise. I want to be prepared for all the crap that life can throw at you, that the business world can throw at me, and everything that goes along with it. So kind of the take away over the last couple of weeks for me is be prepared. Be prepared for those unexpected things that you never know what might be coming your way.