Cate recently wrote that she doesn’t think of herself as having the same body parts or internal processes as her patients. It makes sense–you put up a wall between you and the folks in the beds and on the operating tables so that you don’t lose your mind thinking about the thousands of things that can go wrong in your own body. Sometimes, though, you can’t keep that wall up. Cate came home the other night with the story of a 46 year old man she had seen that day, a father of two with a brain tumor that would allow him another year of life, if he was lucky. Then there was an older woman who was diagnosed with a brain tumor just days after the birth of her granddaughter. And that was just one day at the hospital. I started thinking about how many people’s lives are saved, lost or altered forever in that place on an average day.

One of the things Cate is struggling with now is that the doctors around her don’t show much compassion. Some of them seem to be just going through the motions (the motions of operating on the brain and spinal cord–no big deal). It seems to me that to be a good doctor you have to keep in mind that the old man in the operating room is somebody’s father, somebody’s grandfather. The newborn with hydrocephalus is somebody’s baby.  The wall you put up between you and your patients has to be high enough to let you do your job with a clear head, but low enough to remind you that your job is somebody’s life…