Am I Crazy? December 10, 2007
Posted by keepbreathing in ethics, health and wellness, my life, respiratory therapists, stupid people.trackback
I often wonder if I am actually very crazy and simply unaware of it. If I am crazy, I think I have some kind of Crazy Power Disorder, where beneath my mild-mannered exterior is a raging megalomaniacal egotist who is just waiting for a chance to get loose. I often begin to wonder if I am crazy like this after making judgments on the lives of people who I have never met. For example, one of my patients today.
The patient is a 43-year old man who is in the hospital for a coronary artery bypass graft. He is an unemployed morbidly obese drug-using government-check-cashing drain on society who has recently decided to further his pursuit of scumdom by developing a meth habit. For reasons unclear to me, somebody thought it would be a good use of time and resources to enable this mans lifestyle by fixing the problems he gave himself, and so it was that he underwent a coronary artery bypass grafting today.
When I got report on this man and realized I’d seen him before, and when I realized that he was still abusing drugs and refusing to care for himself, my immediate reaction was rage. Why do we do this? Why do we enable this mans defective lifestyle? There are those who argue that maybe this will be the impetus for him to turn over a new leaf but I simply can not believe that. If he is like every single person I have ever met, he will not turn over a new leaf; he will try for a day or two and then go back to what he was already doing. We’re not going to cure his ills: we are going to enable him to continue his selfish, destructive lifestyle. We are the codependents to his alcoholic, the enablers to his addict. We are making it worse by fixing him. I find myself thinking, If I were in charge we’d just let him die, because otherwise he will never learn. And that is a scary thought to be thinking: it occurs to me that I am disregarding the life of another human being simply because I find him to be a repulsive pile of scum. And then, after that emotional burst, I remember logic, and realize that he was disregarding his life long before I was.
After all of this, I sit down and I find myself wondering: am I crazy? Have I gone off the rails, or am I just being honest with myself and not being sucked into the delusions of some of the aspects of modern medicine?
Any opinions? Am I crazy?
It seems to me that you feel “jaded” about health care.
It’s ok. I’ve lost all hope for humanity a while ago.
That’s why I want to go into pediatrics. They are more victims of circumstance than self abuse/stupidity.
But it’s not your job. We’re not getting paid to have an opinion about people. I secretely dislike obese people and drug addicts but that doesn’t mean that I would tream them any less. It’s illegeal.
i don’t think you’re crazy.
No, you are not crazy. All of us have those feelings. However, we are healers, not judges. There is One who will judge us all, but we are no Him. While we are here, we heal what we can, in spite of all of the tragedies that we cannot heal. We do it because the life the patient may be destroying is still a life, and therefore, underneath all of the bad behavior, intrinsically valuable. We do it because to not do it would be to surrender our fellow sufferer to death, and that is not what healers do.
I think I might be a little worse/more crazy. I’m an MT for a hospital with a subacute unit. Every day I wonder why in the world we spend so much money on people in vegetative states with G-tubes, trachs, decubitus ulcers, contractures with multiple, multiple acute care stays for sepsis, pneumonia, amputations, broken limbs from turning, etc.
What exactly is the point, again? At least the drug addict has potential.
yeah. So not crazy. I think, sadly these are thoughts we all have. Then, we move on from them because we realize we can’t cure the world of it’s ills, and, hey. Consider it ‘job security’.
I think it is difficult for people who work in ER’s and ICU’s etc…because you see the worse of the worse over and over again. And you see them when they have hit rock bottom (which they may do over and over again).
I am a social work intern who sees the same client…
except…
They are in recovery. They are actually sober, in therapy, and turning their lives around. They are successes.
Yes, they can pull themselves up…but then you will not see them in ER’s as much.
***hope***
An obese meth addict?
Yeah, it’s a new thing here. I think they’re early in the process of becoming meth-heads…either that or we’re getting a lot of false positives lately.
Nah, not crazy. We are all just players, caught in a cat’s cradle.
Naah, you’re not crazy.. just in the wrong field. If you want *health* to be your avocation, kick the protocol-driven sham of a damage-control, downwaed spiral of ‘healthcare’ in the head and become a farmer.
Really. Get a few acres of farmland that’s lain fallow for 15 or 20 years and grow organic, whole food. Work for people who DO take care of their bodies and ignore the rest. You’ve NO moral obligation to anyone that can’t be bothered to pay attention to their own health.
Screw McFood of marginal nutritive value. It’s the main reason you have to deal with fat, ignorant slobs.
Word.
Crazy would be to act on something that ends this loser’s life. Not crazy is expressing your thoughts and feelings out loud.