Make Your Voice Heard: Join Us for MSSNY’s Physician Advocacy Day this Tuesday, March 14th!
The future of healthcare in New York is being decided, and it’s more important than ever that leaders in Albany listen to our concerns. To make your voice heard, I hope you’re planning to attend MSSNY’s annual Physician Advocacy Day this Tuesday, March 14th. Register now!
For the first time since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we will hold MSSNY’s Lobby Day in person on Tuesday at the Empire State Plaza (The Egg) in Albany from 7:45-11:00 am. We will hear from legislative leaders in the morning, and in the afternoon, we will meet with our respective legislators in meetings organized by your county medical society.
Please consider joining me—and your fellow NYS Physicians—in Albany on Tuesday to protect access to quality care for our patients.
And, finally, as we look forward to a new week ahead, I’d like to switch gears and share the inspirational story of Art Berg.
“The impossible just takes a little longer.”- Art Berg
On December 26, 1983, Art Berg was on his way to see his fiancée when his car went off the road. A broken neck left him a quadriplegic. Doctors immediately began to impose limits on his life: He would not walk, hold a job, or have children. Those doctors never could have guessed that the man lying before them was determined to prevail, and would, in fact, one day wear his own Super Bowl ring. The Berg story is inspiring and imparts larger lessons about life, fear, and passion.
Years after the accident, Baltimore Ravens Coach Brian Billick called Art Berg to motivate his team. He believed that if grown men are to succeed—to rise to the highest levels of athletic achievement—they must have passion, enthusiasm, dedication, and all that dare-to-be-great stuff. Berg was called again to inspire the team when they had lost a few games and he was subsequently awarded a Super Bowl ring by the 2000 World Champion Baltimore Ravens.
Art Berg gave them following messages and read the poem Invictus (see below):
- Take control: Focus on what you have, not what you don’t have.
- Don’t give up, don’t abandon your mission too quickly.
- Look at the choices you’ve already made, the talents you already have, and work on them, develop them. Don’t become distracted by the many choices we’re told we have in this big, too-busy world.
- When life is hard, Berg said, you learn. When you learn, you grow. When you grow, you control your destiny.
- Dreams are never destroyed by circumstances. Dreams live in your mind and in your heart. Only there can they die.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
