There is something to be gained from every unhappy experience, even if we don't see it right away

Twenty-five years ago last night, I got maybe 90 minutes of sleep.

You may rightly question why there is a small space in my brain that stores this information. Please know I don't have a satisfactory answer for you.

But it's true that the night of September 29, 1996, was a restless one for me.

It was a Sunday evening, and the next day I was scheduled to start a new job as a plan document specialist at a firm called Self-Funded Plans, Inc. Basically, I wrote and edited health insurance documents.

I am now very good at being the new guy, having worked at a number of different organizations over the years. But at that point, I had almost no idea how to handle a new job.

For the previous eight years, since my first week in college, I had worked in the sports departments of daily newspapers: first as a sports agate clerk and later a staff writer for The News-Herald, then for a year with The Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau, then back to The News-Herald for a five-year stay as a full-time sports writer.

And it was great. I loved almost every minute of it.

But as I've described before, it was never going to be a long-term gig for me. I thought it would be, but once Terry and I got married and started having kids, the nighttime hours and relatively low pay made for a bad combination when it came to raising a family.

So I saw the Self-Funded Plans job in the newspaper (OLD GUY ALERT), applied for it, and got it.

And I was so nervous.

To that point, I hadn't worked in a "real" office. Newsrooms look like real offices, but they're not. They're unique.

This was also a 9-to-5 job, which wasn't something I was at all used to.

I also didn't know if I would like it, which made me nervous.

All of these things came together to render me sleepless most of that evening. Midnight came and went, as did 1am, 2am, and 3am. I went out into the living room somewhere between 3 and 4 and still mostly couldn't sleep, but I strung together those 90 fitful minutes of rest on the couch before rising miserably at 6 o'clock.

It was a rough first day, both physically and mentally.

Ultimately, it wasn't a job I enjoyed very much. I spent most of my seven months there thinking I had made a big mistake leaving the comfort of newspapers and entering the world of health insurance.

But over time, it turned out to be a great move. From Self-Funded Plans I went to Advanstar and became the managing editor of Urology Times. It was largely my health care experience at Self-Funded that got me that position.

Then it was the combined health care experience at Self-Funded and Advanstar that helped me land my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic. And that in turn led to a few very enjoyable and productive years at the prestigious Cleveland PR firm Dix & Eaton.

And so on. One position built on the next, and it has all landed me at a very happy, challenging, and frankly fun place in Goodyear.

All of which is to say that, as in many things, we have to force ourselves to consider the long term when we're unhappy in our current situation. Yes, you may need to make a change, but don't underestimate what you've learned from that miserable job or dead-end relationship.

Each of those experiences have made you you. And, if I may say it, you turned out pretty darn well.

We mark the passing of time through anniversaries...good and bad

Dates stick in my head, so it's never a problem, for example, when I have to recount the various jobs I've had and the precise start and end dates for each.

I can rattle those off no problem. Even though it's probably sufficient to say I started at Dix & Eaton in "December 2002," I'm always very specific. It was December 2nd, 2002. My last day at The Cleveland Foundation? Why, that was February 1st, 2011 (a Tuesday).

Today is one of those job-related anniversaries. On this day in 1997, I started as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. As I always like to point out, this is and was a real publication, and it was such an interesting and fulfilling job. I was only there for a little more than two years before I accepted my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic, but without Urology Times, that Cleveland Clinic job likely wouldn't have happened.

So in that sense, May 12th is a good day.

Unfortunately, it's overshadowed by another May 12th date. On May 12th, 2009, as I was brushing my teeth in preparation for a trip to the dentist, we received a call from my brother telling us that my sister Judi had suddenly, shockingly, passed away.

She was only 56, just five years older than I am now. And she was Judi, the oldest sibling and driving force of our family. She organized things. She laughed and smiled. She made everyone happier.

And then...she was just gone. In many ways, we still haven't recovered.

Every May 12th for the rest of my life, I will think about that day and the days that followed. It was just stunned sadness, and it lasted for a very long time.

It never really ended, I suppose.

Still, we move on, because there's nothing else to do. Days like this come and go on the calendar, and as we get older, connected to each one is a memory, a milestone, and a set of emotions.

Some are good. Some aren't.

On balance, this one is an "aren't."

For a short time, I wrote insurance plan documents. God bless the people who do it.

Whenever you sign up for health coverage through your employer or purchase new life insurance, you receive a thick booklet in the mail called the plan description.

Under almost no circumstances will you or anyone you know ever read one of these documents.

I have never met a non-attorney or someone outside of the insurance industry who has read even two pages of one of these things.

I, however, have read them. Several of them.

This is because, for a seven-month period spanning late 1996 into 1997, I wrote health insurance plan documents for a living.

It was an excruciatingly dull job for me, largely because I had previously been a newspaper sports journalist.

On no one's scale of excitement does "insurance plan document specialist" outpace "sports writer."

In retrospect, though, it was an absolutely vital step in my career path. Terry and I were starting to have kids, and our goal was for her to be able to stay home full time to take care of them.

The only way this was going to happen was for me to switch professions and work my way toward a job that (a) paid more, and (b) had regular 9-to-5 hours instead of the strange night-owl schedule of the sports writer.

So I answered an ad in the paper (this is how we used to get jobs, kids) and went to work for a third-party insurance plan administrator writing these documents. I didn't especially enjoy the job, but I learned a lot.

It also gave me enough exposure to health care that I was able to get my next job, which was serving as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. While obviously not sports, it was a position in which I could again put my journalism training to some use.

From UT I moved on to the Cleveland Clinic, my first job as a public relations professional. From there, I went in succession to a PR agency, a community foundation, a large nonprofit, and now Vitamix.

There's probably no way that particular chain of events comes to pass without my time writing those endless insurance documents. People who make a living writing them have my undying admiration.

If there's a moral to this story for those just starting in their careers, it is probably this: Every job is likely to benefit you in some way. Stick it out for at least a little while and use it as a springboard toward your ultimate goal.

Even if that goal is writing thick legal documents that no one is ever likely to read.

Suddenly we're all doctors

So Melanie came downstairs on Saturday morning and complained she had itchy skin bumps on her legs and arms that had kept her from sleeping well. This wasn't good for two reasons:

(1) You never want your child to experience something like that, and

(2) It brought about the seldom-seen-yet-no-less-annoying phenomenon I call "Scott Tennant, M.D."

I never attended medical school, nor do I have any sort of formal medical training. Yet I consider myself perfectly qualified to diagnose and treat a variety of ailments for the same reason millions of other Americans do: We have Internet access.

I imagine doctors must hate the Internet. With the advent of WebMD and other health-oriented sites, the average Joe and Josephine suddenly fancy themselves to be medical professionals, capable of pinpointing every disease and prescribing self-treatment. This allows us to bypass the unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming process known as American health care.

What these sites actually do, of course, is empower each of us to turn medical molehills into mountains. You get the sniffles and find yourself perusing a list of symptoms online, and you quickly become convinced that what you have is not a cold, but rather some exotic sub-Saharan form of rickets or beriberi.

This is made worse in my case by the fact that two of the jobs I've held have been in the medical field. One was as a public relations man for the world-famous Cleveland Clinic, where I got to see more than my share of surgeries up close and personal (and of course now feel I could easily conduct an organ transplant on my kitchen table if given access to the proper tools...and to a patient, of course).

I also spent two years as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. This is true. One of my most tired jokes is when I describe that job as "yellow journalism" (Get it? "Yellow" journalism? It's funny because pee is yellow and...OK, forget it).

But yes, for two years I covered the exciting, fast-faced world of professional urology. Well, I suppose the word "professional" is superfluous. I mean, it's not like there are amateur urologists out there trying to remove people's kidney stones in their garage for 10 bucks a pop. And if there are, I don't want to know anything about it.

One of the byproducts of that job was that I learned an awful lot about urology and urological conditions. More than any non-urologist should know, really. The other byproduct was that I'm now a lot more likely to misdiagnose one of my family members with a life-threatening urological disease based on some benign symptom or other. More than once, I've been fairly convinced my wife had prostate cancer.

Anyway, Melanie came to me with these itchy skin bumps, so I immediately got out the "Illustrated Family Health Guide" from Giant Eagle and fired up my web browser. After seven minutes of exhaustive research, I concluded that Melanie was experiencing some form of hives, possibly as a result of an allergic reaction to the antibiotic she had been taking for strep throat.

And do you know what the worst part was? I was right! Seriously, I nailed it. I took her to the pediatrician, who confirmed my crack diagnosis. She put Melanie on a different antibiotic and gave us some sample packets of Zyrtec to help treat the rash.

Now, of course, I've concluded that I'm smarter (and less expensive) than every doctor out there. I'll be insufferable every time one of the kids gets sick ("Don't worry, Terry, I've got this. What Jared has there is clearly a case of candidiasis, what you non-medical types know as a 'yeast infection.' I recommend a topical vaginal ointment.")

The good thing is, I won't charge Terry NEARLY as much as our pediatrician does to see the kids.