Life was improving

I so wanted this week to be a more bubbely positive post. As my cold dissapeared life brightened. I met a colleague who is off with burn out at the moment and he seems to be on the mend. And has given me the details of his psychololgist that I am thinking of looking into.

Played squash on Thursday with friends and colleagues, and for once did well. The running has really built up my stamina which helped with the squash.

All was great.

Then on Friday I had what is probably in the top 5 traumatic experiences of my life so far.

In the middle of the afternoon we heard ambulances, nothing special there we work close enough to the ring road of the town to hear them as they pass.

Then someone asks me to move my car as there has been an incident in another part of the building and they want to park the ambulance where my car is. No problem, got up to move it assuming someone had fallen or something and they needed the space to move them.

Then came another ambulance to the building, in our room someone joked that there had been a fight and that two of them needed help.

Then the owner of the company called the 100+ people into the canteen. Turns out that one of my colleagues had a chronic condition and he collasped with an aortic embalism. He was revived by a first aider, and then again by the ambulance staff. We would be told if more news came through. I left shortly after, and checked my mail once I got home. There was just a simple email asking everyone to go down to the canteen again. I knew immediately what the meeting would convey, and went into deep, numbed shock.

I was surprised at how shocked I was - it's quite a sized company and I didn't work that closely with the guy, but just could not function for the rest of Friday night. Thursday before leaving we were sharing champagne for a long running project that had just gone live. Now he's gone. A close colleague of mine was the first aider who tried to help him was distraught when I left on Friday (he was being looked after by his wife and some other members of his department). I hate to think what he went through this weekend.

Obviously I am not looking forward to having to go into work in the morning.

All I can say thought is that my deepest sympathies and thoughts are with his family.