One Doctor’s Walk With Death

Resumo

The Patient’s Take

“Doctors are a strange breed. They nibble at an overwhelming amount of information in medical school. They are too bright to miss the incredible distance between what they know and what there is to know. They dedicate their waking hours to memorizing droplets from a great ocean of information. They learn trivial anatomic structures and then promptly forget them. They stand with groups of more experienced physicians and are asked questions they don’t know the answers to. They shake the sleep from their eyes and walk down neon-lit halls feeling inadequate and small… Inevitably, they lose their empathy for pain. The waterfall of pain they hear from countless patients wears them down to smooth rock. After all, they have had to deny themselves so much to succeed. They have endured their own painful humiliation. They have learned that pain is simply a warning mechanism; it isn’t real. Is it any wonder that our painful cries empty into a vacuum when doctors are in the room?”

Shapiro D. Mom’s Marijuana. Nevada City, CA: Harmony Books; 2000