15 February 2012

Till Death Do Us Part

A doctor's job is noble. You treat, you make better, you save, you touch hearts and lives of so many others. It is one of the most heroic career choices to date. Heroic because of the risk doctors take, heroic because of the period of study, training and overall education doctors go through, heroic because of the weight of responsibility doctors burden their shoulders with.

Being a doctor meant you had to face blood and the bleeding - a feat more easily said than done.

Being a doctor meant you had to sacrifice your life to make others healthy and happy even when sometimes you yourself are not.

Being a doctor meant you had to share not only the joy of those around you, but to take in as much pain, suffering, and sickness - both of mind and body - of your patients and their families.

Being a hero meant, sometimes, you do all you can only to realise a life had slipped through your bloody fingers and you are not so heroic afterall. Killer. Murderer!

Life is so full of uncertainties but we strive to prepare for all those murky days - days we could not see coming and going. Death is certain and yet we never make amends for the life hereafter. What manner of logic is that?

Life is also this...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Middlemarch (1871), George Eliot 

Doctors, they lead hidden lives, encased in masks that conceal emotions, work with hands steady and strong, only to die unbeknownst to all, at the hands of the foe they themselves fight. Winning skirmishes and losing some, eventually doomed to death by war.

Death is a friend. It teaches us to value life - both ours and others'.

Heroes are born. Ultimately they die. But the acts don't. I know what I want to be. A hero!

Although reality and fictional aspirations rarely go hand in hand, the one thing both agrees on is but one: Heroes too embrace death....

No comments:

Post a Comment