There are days when you’re so tired you can barely even open your eyes, let alone think straight.
Your head is throbbing, your legs are sore, your hands are aching, and you feel like you’ve conquered Mount Everest simply for having the willpower to drag yourself out of bed in the morning.
The hours morph into each other, you can barely remember what you did 20 minutes ago, because so much has happened since then that you can no longer keep track of anything.
Work politics irritate you because much as you want to avoid them, you keep getting dragged in. Then there are the endless unnecessary bleeps which by some miracle of self-restraint you avoid cursing and swearing about. And of course, by the time you see the sixteenth oliguric patient of the day, you feel like screaming that YOU haven’t peed in the last 5 hours and why isn’t anyone worried about it.
But you’re tired, and overworked, and on the edge, so your behaviour is perfectly understandable.
Then, just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they do- in true Murphy’s law fashion.
And that is when you find out what you’re truly made of. The bleak heart-stopping moment either summons stores of courage and strength and commitment you never even knew you possessed, or it shows you up as the pettily spiteful, shallowly selfish person you really are.
The more you do this, the easier it is to get into the Routine and treat everyone as a statistic, a job to do, a problem to be dealt with, an issue to sort out. It numbs you on some deep internal level, and you mentally divorce yourself from the raw emotions you’re confronted with, sometimes because they’re too complicated to deal with, but mainly because you’re too tired to care.
So plenty of doctors become little more than keyphrase-memorising, textbook-learning, exam-acing robots, dead inside with plastic smiles and mobile expressions of sympathy on cue. We’ve got our reliably effective phrases, our stockpile of nifty tricks, our vast previous experiences to draw from, but nothing that flows from a place of genuine care and sincere empathy.
We live in perpetual Auto mode, and have no idea how to react to a crisis that demands we switch to Manual, and start feeling and behaving like human beings again.
Occasionally, though, you meet someone who shows you what true greatness means. Someone with the courage to make hard decisions, the conviction to stick by them, the determination to carry out the task to completion without once wavering. And at the end of it all, through failure and grief and loss and pain, someone with the grace to acknowledge and admit their limitations, and the humility to show that vulnerability.
I think I needed that reminder. Thank you, sir.
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