I memorized formulas and theories and equations, reciting them by day and humming them by night, all so I could be eligible to apply for medical school. I cut cadavers, me, who meant to run away from the corpses that a war whelped. I followed their embalmed veins to their bloodless hearts and I held their brains in my shaking hand. I learned a language that only my classmates and my teachers understood, as far from vernacular as “vermis,” as distant from colloquial as “callosum,” not even literary or poetic or artistic, not charming, not stylized, not creative. A language of names and nouns and descriptions only the descriptors comprehend, that is when they can decipher their own handwriting. One test, two tests, three tests and I stopped counting. I stopped hanging diplomas and certificates on my walls. I didn’t stop learning, memorizing, analyzing, criticizing. Even today, I haven’t yet. I swore an Oath, written 2500 years ago, “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.” I dreamt by day and drank coffee by night. I pushed carts, wheeled beds, answered phones, wrote notes, and all while the incessant beeping of my pager demanded attention. I saw blood welling in wounds, in pores and in surgical cuts, running, clotting, staining sheets, and towels and sweaty plastic gloves. But I also saw blood rushing from plastic bags into skins and opening eyes I thought would close forever. I stayed up, one night, two nights, all night, pacing hospital wards and worrying, not about what is outside, the cold, the poor, the hungry, the unemployed, but about the people lying in the beds and how to keep them breathing till morning. Not all of them did. I pounded on many chests, pumped oxygen down many throats, closed many eyes, often being the first to spill a grieving tear on my way to the waiting room where their loved ones hoped I wouldn’t come. I gave news, bad news, worst news. I held hands, squeezed, hugged even. I was scorned, rejected, blamed, fired. And conversations, and conversations, and conversations. Gratitude came, often in disguise, though it was never expected or sought. And every night I come home, not alone but accompanied by all the faces, all the lives, all the minds, and all the pulses. My house is haunted by lab results and MRI scans and medications dosages, problems and symptoms and unanswered questions. I lie in bed and with me snuggle the corpses and the smiles, the ails and the cures, and the ones I call their loved ones short of calling friends. I worry and worry and think and think and the night draws into morning and somehow my eyes had shut and rested. When next you come into my office, or into your physician’s, remember that we are not “service providers,” as the money-making industry that exploits us to leech on your finances wants you to believe. We are men and women that roam your cities and your villages, anxious and worried, spreading a knowledge that never quenches from learning, searching for answers under every unturned rock, healing what we can and soothing what we can’t, smiling when you live longer, happier and free from pain, and when you succumb to that foe we despise called disease, we weep, albeit not before you.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 06:35:54 +0000
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