Skip to main content

Handle with Care -- Writer's Poke #353


The Doctor cares about his patients. His cleaning lady, Barbara, who is also probably his closest friend, probably knows more about him than anyone. Whereas he keeps a professional distance with his patients, he tells Barbara the story of staying up with a teething baby. He does so not because he can ease the baby’s pain, but because staying up with her offers the baby comfort – the only comfort the Doctor has to give.


In other words, the Doctor is nurturer. He doesn’t like to see his patients in pain, and although he doesn’t have the power to magically make everyone better, it’s pretty clear that he is honest when he claims that he wants to do the best for the people he treats.

Dorota’s husband is one of his gravely-ill patients; she is also his neighbor. He recognizes her as the woman that ran over his dog a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem to hold a grudge about that. He has compassion for what she’s going through, and he offers her compassion – although he also doesn’t want her to take advantage of his kindness.

Dorota wants answers that the Doctor cannot provide; she would like to know whether or not her husband will recover from his illness. All the Doctor can really tell her is that the prognosis doesn’t look promising. Is his method of response appropriate? Should the Doctor do more to comfort Dorota, or should he simply maintain his professional distance?

“Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.” – Chogyam Trungpa

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...