Not All That Glamorous

I've become very aware that doctors are called upon to see things society may not find palatable. From the loose, wrinkled, scarred skin of an eighty year old patient to the purulent bleeding eye of a victim of a dog bite, we deal with things that we might, under closed doors, consider to be gross. I admit it. I know it's wrong. But I recoil when I see the effects of gonorrhea-induced conjunctivitis in babies or hear about parasites burrowing into the skin and laying eggs. I mean, I haven't even been in this for ten weeks; I haven't changed the way I look at things. I still avoid bad smells and bodily fluids.

But I know that my visceral emotion will not prevent me from treating these patients. After you dig through the fat of the ischioanal fossae of a cadaver and dissect away the plantar aponeuroses, there's not much that will completely gross you out. And when you see these patients, you really understand that they need you, and you have the training to treat them. The visceral response may even help us as physicians empathize with the patients. No longer is it a clinical infectious disease or an avulsion or a third-degree burn. Now, this is something ruining the life of the person in front of you, something wrong with their body that they hate, something that the parents are terrified will scar the child forever. When we see such disgusting, revolting, blood-and-pus-spewing sights, we should be moved, not only by duty, but by some desire to restore humanity to an injured individual.