"When a good person die, let's hope his/her death brought impact on someone in the world;
When a good person die, there should be someone that cares."
I don't recall the exact words Dr. Allison Cameron (by Jennifer Morrison) said when she defied Dr. James Wilson (by Robert Sean Leonard) who lectured her for being too sentimental and friendly with a patient. Cameron's passion for her patients might be regarded as a reaction of anomaly, and yet it is her empathy and leniency that makes her a remarkable and unforgetable impact on someone that she has been meaning to save.
I am not a doctor, nor do I have any close friends in medical force. But a physically delicate child like me, I have been through numerous physical checkups and in-and-out of hospitals during my youthful years with serious conditions of ailment. I grew up to be a sort of hypercondiac, trying to find the definite cause of all my physical and mental discomfort.
Good doctors are rare, in terms of those with the quality of compassion, patience, and the perseverance and zest of seeking the truth. Unfortunately, I have come across few that I (or my friends and family) would consider good doctors.
>>I was eighteen when I was admitted to a local medical center for pneumonia. Once admitted, a solumn-look young intern was sent to check on me. Before he did an electrocardiogram on me, he demanded that I take off everything, with no mercy of noticing my embarrassment. As a conservative girl without any prior sexual experience nor had I pose nude in front of anyone since ten years old, I almost burst in tears when he insisted that I took off my top and brassiere right there in front of him. And yes, there was only him, the intern, the whole ten minutes when he insisted on my getting rid of everything. I hasitated and would not give in but did not know what to do. Thanks to a nurse that came in later, I was saved by being told that I could take off the top and unbukle of undergarment but let it remain there covering my most private parts. A simple incident like this, I kept it secretly and painfully in me for years.
Then there were my resident doctor and another intern that turned out to be the most encouraging and helpful persons for me. As the youngest admitted in the section, I caught some attention, but in the meantime, I was troubled by the idea that I had to be examined by a roomful interns and different doctors. A shy girl I was, I felt uncomfortable with the intense scrutiny by a crowd of strangers, discussing and talking in terms that I was not familiar with. I felt defident, desolate and hopeless until the intern Lin sat beside me and encouraged me like a counselor, filling me in more about what I had contracted. The resident doctor of the section was nice enough to sit in my ward and sacrificed his break time with my family and reassured us about the treatment and my progress in recovery.>>
When facing someone that is forlorn (literally or emtionally speaking), the worst thing in the world would be putting the person there alone on the spot without further explanation, without hope and without any chanel of letting them express what they really feel. I was fortunate to have the two doctors that stood by me at the hard time when I was thrown out to the world facing the brutality of unhappiness and misfortune for the first time. Nonetheless when I think of those cocky, self-conceited, know-it-all, been-there-done-that tones from the doctors that take patients' surprises, denial, depression and other emotional sentiment for granted and for irritation, I felt sorry for both the patients and doctors: for a desperate patient, s/he might feel alone in nowhere facing death all by her/himself and yet, worst of all, there's no way out, no outlet for her/him; for an unsympathetic doctor, I feel sorry that s/he has worn out her/his passion and regret that s/he remained in the business for the sake of his/her benefit and social status, the capitals. After all, having a self-interets-oriented doctor is the worst nightmare for a patient in despair.