In a battle, soldiers have at least guns and tanks to defend themselves. But how does one defend oneself from a deadly virus that has no cure yet? They know this. Yet, they continue serving afflicted strangers, putting their lives at risk, leaving their families at a big risk, and their closed ones going fatherless, motherless, sisterless, daughterless, friendless.
It’s easy to say that doctors are like gods. They certainly are not. Gods aren’t at a risk of working themselves to death, but doctors and nurses do. Every day.
You are lucky if you’re a doctor.
You see how society, businesses and governments have divided people into super luxury, luxury, twin-sharing and general beds. People leave their parents under doctors’ care while they take a holiday during their children’s vacations. Courts put scamsters in a super delux room with the excuse of chest pain, while the child you operated on languishes in the hot and humid netherworld of the general ward. You see how a doctor’s friends or family ask for free consultation as if its their birthright. You see how people don’t want to donate blood to save their parents, but will rant and rave about hospitals.
You are lucky because you inhabit the thin line between the system and its people, the government and its voters, the corporate and its customers. One might even say, between the living and the dead. You respond to both, you belong to neither. Constantly operating on that thin red line, unable to break out, the price being devastating for any transgression. It is your honour. Never forget.