First, Do No Harm

I can remember my first visit to the doctor more clearly than what I had for breakfast this morning...

Near Mockingbird Lane in Dallas, Our family's pediatrician for three generations, Dr. Robert Young, had a cozy office in a converted brick residence, shaded by giant oaks . An intricate, heavily detailed storybook map covered one whole wall of his waiting room, entranced and captured my imagination. How many hundreds of tiny fingers like mine traced through trails through its forests and along the ocean shorelines?  His bespeckled eyes were full of warmth and kindness. Tapping the exam table with a "let's hop up here, kiddo, and see what we've got", his short sleeved lab coat pockets produced wooden tongue depressors and lollipops with cotton loops instead of sticks. He'd check eyes, nose, ears; feel lymph nodes and listen to heartbeats. No matter the illness or procedure, Dr. Young gave his diagnosis in two languages: adult and child.
Fifty years ago, my grandmother and I were in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. Before the days of seat belts, I was standing on the seat next to her, my arm around her neck. At impact she was ejected through the windshield but not before throwing me to the floorboard. The El Camino accordioned. No one realized anyone else was in the car. It wasn't until hours later, when the family gathered at the hospital, did a search begin. How much of that time I was conscious is up for debate. (As an adult, I can become catatonic from claustrophobia.) There was a black wet nose - the watch dog at the tow yard - and then Dr. Young was smiling down, assuring me, 'you're gonna be just fine, kiddo". And I knew I would be because he had said so. 

Early one morning a couple of years ago, I was strapped down on a stainless steel gurney in a small, icy surgical suite, about to undergo out-patient surgery.  (My primary care physician, to whom I've stubbornly clung for the last 10 years, operating under the idiotic belief that we had some kind of rapport, wasn't there.) Instead, I found myself surrounded by a small group masked strangers who, as they went about preparing me for whatever it was they were going to do, loudly complained that they weren't paid enough for the amount of hours this particular hospital required of them. Sitting with his feet propped up on a nearby desk, the specialist in charge was loudly leading the complaint litany, remarking rather snidely to his team that "four more of these things" stood between him and golf at noon. Mounting anxiety prompted me to ask (again) legitimate questions as to exactly what this procedure entailed and why it was necessary. Judging by their very heavy accents, English, was not the primary language spoken by anyone in the room, but I knew they'd heard me. This was, pure and simply, an assembly line, and I was just a "thing" - trusting my life to a person more concerned about his tee time than my welfare. 

I tried to recall Dr. Young's face. How different medical care had become.

Granted, my disease is rare with no textbook treatment or cure. I get that. Stuff happens. BUT the 'stuff' I'm dealing with now isn't from the disease. It's from several different 'specialists', each with their own treatment idea and no clue as to what the others were doing to me. I think its a three-fold problem: 

a.) there is no centralized patient information, 
b.) they've got too many patients to follow and 
c.) they just don't care. 

I quit going because it was doing more harm than good. Are medical school graduates even still required to take the Hippocratic Oath?

 "I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone."

My generation was taught to trust and respect doctors, teachers, policemen, the clergy, neighbors and friends. To trust in God, our country, a handshake and Walter Cronkite. That a single voice can make a difference. Bottom line, the fault in all of this is all mine, really; mine for falling back on the mentality of the age in which I was raised and refusing to acknowledge the end of the innocence; spoiled by the milk of human kindness and soured at its lack.

Can one voice even still be heard?

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