I have the tendency to feel heart broken over the lives of my patients. Their poverty, their illness, their humiliation - if I am not careful weigh me down and eventually by the end of the day I've accumulated so much grief my chest is heavy with the burden.
And so, I have found I have begun removing myself emotionally from the stories I hear. Refusing to acknowledge the sad thoughts creeping into the fringes of my mind, extricating feelings from the rational judgments required of me.
Unfortunately, this has led me to question my long standing ambition to join Doctors Without Borders after completing residency. I am not sure the impact of the experiences would be reparable. I assume it would be much like returning home after experiencing the gruelling realities of war. And the things I would see would haunt me for the rest of my life.
But if we were all to think this way, no one would set off to the forgotten corners of the world to make the problems of the people over there our own.
I recently read a speech by J.K Rowling, the romanticism of which only confused me further; she says, "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."
To be continued.
1 comment:
..."and is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?"
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