Doctors and vocation

MAY God bless all the doctors in the world! I've always admired them. Even as a kid, I already idolized them.

Resplendent in their white outfit and with a great sense of duty and responsibility always written in their faces and comportment, there was no way I would not be attracted to them.

There in the province where I grew up, I was a neighbor of the provincial hospital and witnessed many acts of heroism of doctors. At that time, I heard nothing negative about them. Only praises, admiration, very positive things.

Even my father, a lawyer, who was kind of hard to please and very sparing in his praises, said many good things about doctors. To a young mind like mine at that time, it was something. It reinforced my attraction to the doctors.

Still, with all this intense admiration for them, it never crossed my mind that I should be a doctor.

I had no doctors among my relatives, and so no one encouraged me to be one. Also, I heard that to be a doctor one had to go through long, arduous studies and that it cost a lot.

But I don't think these were the reasons. I think the reason was, and is, simply that I am not cut out for it. It's not my vocation. I never entered into some difficult moment figuring out whether I could be a doctor.

I discovered this automatically because the mere sight of blood and the other graphic forms of human misery wrought by sickness or accidents simply mortified me to death.

It's just that whenever I see physical pain or discomfort in others, I seem to feel them, myself, immediately. And thus, even if I was always curious to see and visit sick people, I also suffered quite a bit by doing that.

Precisely because of this, my mother used to tell me I was a bundle of contradictions. Whenever I heard the ambulance siren, I would immediately run to the hospital to see what happened. And then I would run away after seeing the victims.

Thus, I understand that young man who came to me some time ago to confide a problem, in fact, a raging personal crisis. He was a medical student who was starting his internship.

He was a good boy, bright and was the top of the class. His parents were all supportive. In fact, they were the ones that told him to enter medicine, since at that time he had no clear idea what to be.

When he was assigned to the provincial hospital in one of the rotations, he said he just could not stomach anymore the things that he saw there. He thought he had to change profession.

I could not blame him. From what I could see in him, he was a very sensible young man, and so that discomfort he felt could not just be a passing thing. I advised him to think about it slowly. Later, he decided to change course.

The other day, someone called me to visit his father who was rushed to a provincial hospital in Cebu. It was my first time to visit that hospital. And what I saw -- and smelled -- were just unforgettable.

The man, already in a coma, was not in an intensive care unit. He was in a ward with other patients in different degrees of misery. For his breathing, he had a tube attached to a bag that was manually pumped by a very tired-looking relative.

The attending doctor was a young lady -- she looked like she was not past 30 -- who tried to insert another tube to the mouth of the man with the assistance of two old nurses.

It was a funny sight, because in the middle of that procedure, the doctor asked that a mask be placed on her face. Then one of the nurses wrapped around the doctor's face a used, wet diaper. The doctor exploded in anger.

But the whole sight was really painful. Every time the man winced in pain, I also winced. I tried to look strong and solid as I prayed and gave the last sacraments.

But the point came when I could not take it any longer. I was saved, though, when the boy who asked to visit his father broke down, and I had to take him out of the room.

Again, I realized that to be a doctor one needs a special vocation. And I simply don't have that. Thus, I only have praises and prayers for all the doctors who take care of us in ways no other persons can.