Monday, April 7, 2008

The Doctor as Patient

It’s close to midnight here and I am rushing this post in solidarity with my fellow Filipino physician bloggers. I guess the longer you remain in this business, the more you realize that we are able to continue practicing in fairly good health solely because of some special grace. I am not old and yet I know of quite a number of classmates and batchmates who have died, contracted metastatic cancer, undergone angioplasties and bypasses, and the like.

While I really should be more conscientious in meeting my health screening milestones (at least an annual lipid profile, diabetes screening, colonoscopy, etc) I have only become more cavalier with time because let’s face it, the time allotted us is truly very short and the more we think we can beat that aneurysm growing in our brains with a monthly cerebral CT angiogram, the less importance we give to why we are alive in the first place.

Introspection as to what this is all about needs to take precedence over finding ways of prolonging life for the hell of it. Some old folk have this nasty habit. Much like those self-important geniuses who devote countless hours musing about the existence of God.

Get over it. We are all patients. Our illness is our inability to fully appreciate the exceptional blessing bestowed to us of being able to leave this world a better place.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

so true Doc, so true.

Anonymous said...

Highly pragmatic, yet full of philosophy.
Looks like you are still getting blasted with spam. Why don't you enable the add-on where a password is requested of the commenter before it is posted?

Martin D. Bautista, M.D. said...

Thanks megamom from dropping by. A friend set up this blog for me and I don't know how to activate that feature. I'll see if I can ask someone down here. Take care.

ness said...

hello doc martin,

would like to invite you to join TBR 5. the theme is "I know what you did last summer!"

do share an exciting summer adventure you had in the past!

thanks :-)

ness said...

hi doc martin,

would like to remind you of the deadline for submission of entries to the Blog Rounds 5th edition = tomorrow april 15 at 5 pm yet so you still have time to write!

hope to hear from you :-)