One of my doctors, who I won't name to help him keep his job, displayed an unusually passionate political point of view in his office the other day. A patient brought in a DVD of the Kite Runner to watch during their chemo. He made a comment along the lines of, this goes to show you what happens if you abandon a country and don't finish the job. This was all it took to get the doc off on a tirade. "Maybe the US should have finished the job in Afghanistan, before invading Iraq. You know, do you know, if we were to take all the money we spend on Iraq militarily and just handed cash to the Iraqis, do you know how it would be? 175,000$ for each man woman and child in Iraq. Every year. It is insane. I have to fight to get my patients a CT scan. Every day I am fighting this system and I am tired. I'm going to build a house in India and leave the US."
I was impressed. He is a good man, but I would never expect a open discussion of his opinions in front of a half dozen patients. I guess the cancer community is more like a family. We spend lots of time together getting chemo in a group. We're all pretty vulnerable. Our doctor is a rock star. We hang on his words and revel in his attention.
1 comments:
Very strange. I check your blog every morning. You published this on the 7th and I didn't SEE it until the 18th. I guess it was a good idea to uninstall my "reader" and install a different one this morning. I wonder what else I have missed.
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