(See what I am saying?): rewarding modern medicine

October 20, 2003

rewarding modern medicine

She took her elbow off the dinner table, leaned back in the maroon upholstery, and looked at me like a child who just broke the cookie jar.

"I guess that makes what we do sort of unnessary doesn't it?" she said as she turned to me.

We were talking to Mike about his experiences diagnosing Addison's disease, delivering babies, and all the things med students do that remind me that there are always people who are smarter and spend their time better than me.

She felt like i feel every time i listen to someone who reminds me that my perspective is always too narrow, and my mind is always too small.

i thought about my friend chris south who is 4 years into becoming a doctor, and how he has taught me that there are people who work hard to do real things for real reasons that have allowed me to tie a tie around my neck and pull my chair under the white table cloth and enjoy a wedding rehersal dinner.

I looked back at her and smiled with understanding.

i took a drink. i thought about countless phenomena, - only the likes of chris and mike would know- that were at work that allowed me to taste the white wine in my stomach and in my head. i leaned back and looked up into Pittsburgh's Grand Concourse through the dark air fermented a century and two years longer than the wine in my glass. The oak colored air acended into the mahogany and marble mosaic overhead and the ornamental phasade hung on the arched clearstory and arcades that bent and wrapped around and through the oak colored air and bowed sliently over us in honor of our presence.

i took a drink and watched the bride and groom kiss and groomsman toast and parents laugh. i looked at the sterling engraving on the teaspoons and dinner knives and followed the gold pattern on the rim of the dinnerpate as it tied itself in knots around the ground pepper scattered across the ivory china.

I looked at her looking at me. i thought about everyone who has ever taken advantage of their beating heart and voltaic mind to make the things i see more beautiful than they needed to be.

i thought about everyone who has felt their beating heart fall in love. i thought about everyone who has had their voltaic mind try to make sense and find grace in the world they perpsire and laugh and love and ache a lifetime through.

i thought about everyone who has acknowledged their retinas and corneas and contracting irises and looked at the world as if it were all the rewards of good - or at least corrected - eye sight, and a life allowed to be lived by good health; and protected by med students who work hard to do real things for real reasons. by doctors who are smarter and spend their time better than me. by farmers and biologists, botantist, engineers and chemitsts who have made it able for me to put my black patent leather shoes under the white linen table cloth and eat and drink and celebrate a new love under the mahogany and marble mosaic that arched and bent and wrapped around over head in the oak colored air.

I thought about everything i have ever seen in the world and held in my hands and thought in my head, and how it is both a reward of and reason for modern medicine.

I looked at the chandlier light that fell into the wine glasses and refracted through the green iris in her eyes.

"I think he would agree," i said quietly to no one in the world but her, "that life wouldn't be worth living- or saving - unless it was so beautiful."

Posted by Todd Roeth at October 20, 2003 12:02 AM

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I think doctors crave attention.

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