Originally posted by gooloogooloo
a 70 years old radiologist with a ring... if i were you, i will suspect that he must have an unhappy story about his past relationship, perhaps a broken family, perhaps his wife left her for being malpracticing or negligence or over-devotion into materialism such as money... whatever it is, for such an old hopeless rude man, i will be bold to dig it out. i will ask him why are you wearing a ring? u ever married? how come she left u? what happened? how come u seem unhappy?
i will give him a stress interview. most importantly, perhaps he needs someone to revive him by confrontation.
hope this makes u feel better. i just think that there are way too many old physician out there who lost the joy of life and have really no passion whatsoever in their career and their pathetic ill-managed life from the ever-so-stressful and hard-to-understand community.
quoted from atul gawande, " doctor belong to an insular world- one of hemorrhages and lab tests and people sliced open. we are for the moment the healthy few who live among the sick. and it is easy to become alien to the experiences and sometimes the values of the rest of civilization. ours is a world even our families do not grasp. this is, in certain respects, the experience of athletes and soldiers and professional musicians. unlike them, however, we are not only removed, we are also alone. once residency is over and you've settled in Sleepy Eye or the northern peninsula of Michigan, or for that matter, Manhattan, the slew of patients and isolation of practice take you away from anyone who really knows what it is like to cut a stomach cancer from a patient or lose her to a pneumonia afterward or answer the family's accusing questions or fight with insurers to get paid."