Justice

I think human nature inherently believes in or wants to believe in a sense of justice. Even though we know things aren't fair, we really want them to be fair. We want to take a world of entropy and cage it in rules, make it predictable and known. And though I know this is irrational, I can't help but feel this way about our recent burglary. When our house was broken into, I was probably anesthetizing a two year old child who had a dogbite. My fiancee was telling a woman with glioblastoma multiforme that her cancer was worse and she had to tell her children she was likely to die in less than a year. On the one hand, our lives are charmed and idyllic when compared to the crises of these patients (and parents and children). We have nothing to complain about; we ought to feel grateful for our good health and fortune. Yet on the other hand - the side of me that is a little ashamed - I think of how unfair it is that right before Christmas, we were working late in the hospital caring for others, when some stranger took our laptops and jewelry. We never did anything to deserve this, I think. I realized that this must also be how patients sometimes feel, the feelings they never share with their doctors. Our child never did anything to deserve a dog bite to the face, thinks the parents of my patient; I never did anything to deserve brain cancer, thinks my fiancee's patient. Oh, in the end, we know that fairness has little to do with it. But this incident has taught me a little more about how human nature reacts and perhaps how my patients feel.