Agriculture

All this week I’ve been appreciating my farm chores as welcome breaks from the stresses of my day job. As a lawyer, I often represent people with serious illness whose insurers are denying them access to treatments. This week I was juggling three cases (an older woman with breast cancer, a young woman with an immune deficiency, and a middle-aged man for whom standard hormone replacement medications would not work) in which delays in getting the treatments prescribed by their doctors would mean prolonged symptoms, risk of disability or death, or all of the above. Such clients quite naturally react to their predicaments with emotions that range from anxiety to desperation to rage. When things don’t appear to be moving fast enough or in their favor, some react by doubting my competence or lashing out at me. After forty plus years of such work, you’d think I would have developed coping mechanisms to both manage their expectations and prevent their anxieties from becoming mine. Those mechanisms don’t always suc