T4 -- Totally True Travel Tales - Unplanned Trip to the ICU

by Kara Cook

T4 Is an ongoing series of hard-to-believe but true encounters traveling to our signature at-home closings. For more than 10 years we’ve been taking the closing anywhere that’s convenient for the client – literally anywhere. So, we have unintentionally amassed quite a few crazy stories that didn’t seem humorous at the time, but in hindsight, they certainly offer us a good bit of levity. Like they say, “you can’t make this stuff up!”

Jana Paterson, a veteran closing attorney, has regaled us more than once with this story of her trip to the hospital a few years ago – not for herself but for a closing!

We started offering “at home” closings because we understood that life happens to all of us. Our goal at Cook & James is to meet our clients wherever they are and without judgement, to help make their lives just as easy as possible. But this story, for Jana, kind of topped the cake in terms of being taken by surprise…she still talks about her trip to the ICU all these years later.

She had a closing set for a Thursday afternoon in mid-town Atlanta when the day before, on Wednesday, she got a call from the client. He wanted to change the location to Grady Memorial Hospital. Not quite believing her ears, she asked the gentleman to please repeat himself.

“I had a heart attack yesterday evening and I’m in ICU at Grady,” he said, rather matter-of-factly. “Can you just come here instead of my office?”

Without hesitation - and to her credit - Jana replied, “sure.”

Jana, like all of us, knows that life goes on. Maybe for this man, the best thing was to keep life as normal as possible – and for him that meant keeping a schedule. So off she went to the ICU.

“When I arrived, there he was sitting up in bed – in his hospital gown,” Jana said. “Definitely not my normal closing set up and I was more than a teeny bit surprised. But he made sure to stay covered and we got all the papers signed on that little wheelie table that fits so conveniently right over a hospital bed.”

“It was actually a pretty quick closing and I was mostly thrilled the nurses didn’t interrupt us to take his vitals because, honestly, I was concerned about that whole situation. All in all, he was a pretty lucky guy…he didn’t need bypass surgery, any operations, and he recovered just fine from his heart attack. And…he got his closing accomplished on time by a pro!”

~ Jana Paterson as told to Kara