Flashes of Panic

There’s some quirkiness in the timing. A year ago today, I posted an article detailing the steps I was starting to take to enable my users and my company to handle emergencies without me. My primary motivation, though I didn’t mention it at the time, was to provide some continuity for my successor (Hi, N!) since I knew I wasn’t going to be there much longer than a year from then. But I also noted, half-whimsically, that maybe I’d get hit by a bus or something.

This morning, I got an email from a former co-worker with a subject line bearing the name of one of my former roommates from Pennsylvania. (I won’t go into more detail, because more of you than you’d expect would recognize the names of both the roommate and the co-worker.) Seems my former roommate had a bad headache on his run this morning. His wife took him to the hospital, where they determined he’d had a brain aneurysm burst. He’s described as “lucid,” but he’s going for surgery tomorrow.

The co-worker notes that this former roommate lives two blocks from one of the local hospitals; however, later today he was supposed to be driving, alone, to a meeting in central PA. He was also planning on running Hood to Coast next week; he could’ve been running through the woods alone when this happened.

Somehow I feel like we’re too young for this sort of thing to be happening. And I wonder how up to date my information is.