They Don't Screen For It On Med School Applications

I had coffee with a good friend yesterday who is grieving over the death of his life-partner.  He told me how painful it was to be told of his loved one's death while he was driving to the hospital on the freeway.  He had told the doctor at the beginning of the conversation where he was and what he was doing, but the doctor just blurted it out anyway.

Apparently that was neither the first nor the last time this doctor had shown such lack of sensitivity. When one operation got delayed by several hours, my friend (whose partner was getting progressively weak and dehydrated) was met not with an apology but with, "Well, if you want to trust the care you get at a community hospital, you can go there."  This doctor didn't soften until my friend finally broke down in sobs in front of him at the hospital after his partner died.  Then I think the ice finally cracked a little.

I see this a lot in medicine.  I think it boils down to this:  being "Calvary-ready" or not.  People are either ready, willing, and able to be close to human suffering - to look at a weeping man, woman, or child in the eye, talk to people in distress, touch their wounds, embrace broken bodies and wounded souls, without recoiling - or they're not, and they have to build up layers of arrogance, insensitivity, and cynicism in order to function.  You're either afraid of it or willing to confront it face-to-face.  There's no check-box for that on medical school applications.  Everyone claims to be well-suited to deal with people's blood and tears.  Everyone says they want to help people who are in pain.  But some people really don't even want to be in the same room as a suffering person.

My friend was Calvary-ready.  He was in a committed relationship with his life-partner for thirty-five years - a little less than my entire lifetime.  Most of his adult life.  In the end he absolutely refused to consider letting an institution care for his loved one and learned how to do all the work himself - trache tube changes, machine adjustments, every nursing task down to the grittiest, most menial one.  For those who cannot accept a definition of marriage that includes the kind of relationship these men had:  if this isn't a model of enduring, faithful, Christ-like,unselfish, sacramental love that Christians want all married couples to grow toward, I don't know what is.