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Eight-thousand people are expected to pack Jetties Beach Saturday evening, settling into their beach chairs with coolers, kids, picnic baskets and expectations of a good time as they listen to Keith Lockhart conduct the Boston Pops, with special guest star Carly Simon.
Proceeds benefit Nantucket Cottage Hospital, and there couldn't be a worthier cause.
We need a quality hospital for two reasons: You never know and you always know. We never know when an accident or an emergency will rear its head out of a perfect day. And the fact is, we need continuing and preventive care as we grow older - although many of us try to ignore that we are getting into those days when the list of tests that might keep us alive needs to be on our calendars.
You never know when, suddenly, on a perfect sunny day with kids laughing and playing in the yard, one of those kids, not paying attention, will trip over a piece of equipment, slice his leg open to the bone, bleed profusely and need to be rushed to the hospital.
You never know when the routine job of shingling or painting a house ends up with a tradesman taking a helicopter ride to Boston in a fight for his life after the staging collapses, or a misstep sends him plummeting 20-30 feet to the ground with severe spinal and facial injuries.
You never know when the five-minute car ride to the library results in a terrible accident with emergency personnel on the scene and the driver on a stretcher headed to the ER.
You never know, as you head to the beach to enjoy a day of body-surfing in the waves at Cisco, that you might end up in the ER after a loose surfboard smashes into your face, with doctors spending hours picking shards of fiberglass out of your chin.
You never know when any of a number of medical tests and exams end up saving your life.
These are just the examples we have seen from personal experience or in stories that flow through any newspaper office.
Life is funny like that. Despite the best well-laid plans, you never know what's going to happen next. Life changes in an instant.
By dint of being here, we are all potential patients of Nantucket Cottage Hospital, and don't we want that hospital to be the best it can be?
Every community, no matter how small or off the beaten path, revolves around at least a couple of institutions: A school system to teach our kids, a fire department and a police department to keep us safe, a library, some sort of political structure to keep all the parts moving, and a well-staffed, fully-functional hospital.
You are born here, or choose to make a home here, or arrive every summer. In each case, and sometimes for the same reasons, Nantucket Cottage Hospital is - very simply - a part of our lives here.
(Reprinted with permission of the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror)
Also appearing in the August 11 edition of the Inquirer & Mirror:
Hospital optimistic about the future | 
