The day:  Easter Sunday……The Time:  mid-morning

Our on-call staff responded to the patient's request for an RN visit.  While at the patient's home attending to the patient's needs the RN asked if the patient and her family were getting together for Easter dinner.  The patient responded, "It's Easter?  I didn't know."  The patient lives alone and the RN asked if she could contact the patient's family to see if dinner was planned and was given the okay.  A quick phone call revealed there were no plans, what little family our patient had needed to rest that day.

The RN, knowing that she herself had a big family dinner planned, asked the patient if she could return later that day and bring her an Easter dinner.  The patient responded simply, "If you want to".  Later that day the RN visited again, this time bringing a wonderful holiday feast - turkey, stuffing, and all the trimmings.  Our patient was delighted and said, "You people really do care about me".

Just before she left our patient asked the RN if she could do the patient a favor.  The RN replied, "Sure, what do you need";

The patient, who has next to nothing herself, went to her cupboard and got out her one loaf of bread, dividing it in two.  She then retrieved a block of commodity cheese and carefully cut it in half, to this she added 2 cans of green beans and two oranges.  Turning to our RN she asked, "Could you deliver this to my friend, she has nothing to eat"

The RN willingly delivered the food to the patient's friend and discovered that what our patient had said was quite true - this friend literally had nothing to eat.  In fact, as she thanked our RN member for delivering the food she remarked, "we were wondering what we were going to eat, we really have nothing".

Our patient lived out the truth of what Albert Einstein said, "It is every man's obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it."

Anne Frank, who with her family hid from the Nazi's in the 1940's by living for over two years in hidden rooms in her father's office building until they were betrayed (she died in a concentration camp seven months after her arrest at the age of sixteen) wrote "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."