Overwhelmed

I’m overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed by the immensity of medical knowledge smothering me every day. 

Overwhelmed by the devastating poverty of knowledge, health, hope, and resources I see in my patients every day.  

I spit hairs learning the distinguishing characteristics of diastolic vs systolic heart failure and the various methods of medicating those hearts based on their presenting symptoms. But what I really want to do is listen to my patient’s story, sit on her front porch, visit the grocery store with her, and understand how her body decayed into such disrepair.

I finally realized why so many of my patients are so sick. It dawned on me while listening to my 58 year old patient explain to me that no matter how badly she wants to keep working at the Waffle House, the joints in her knees, ankles and shoulders simply can’t take the on-your-feet, running around, 12 hour shifts. She comes home every night in agonizing pain. Her husband finally convinced her to stay home and apply for disability. 

When their education level disqualifies them from any job other than physical labor, men spend their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties in ship yards, oil rigs, and sugar cane factories.  Women work as waitresses, janitors, home health aides. Their bodies suffer from decades of demanding physical labor and abuse that people in the middle and upper middle class can barely imagine. After their knees give out or they strain their back lifting their 10,000^th 2x4 over their head, they lose their sole economically viable commodity- their physical bodies.  

Decades of abuse on their joints and muscles, getting paid barely minimum wage, with no health insurance.  When their bodies finally breakdown, they’re labeled as lazy leaches to our society.  They don’t want to go on disability. They don’t want to sit at home feeling emasculated, crippled, and worthless. But after spending their lives serving us our food and literally building our roads, homes, cars, endless goods we buy at Wal-Mart, we deny them basic access to health care and support the need simply because they are poor.  This is the definition of injustice.

Don’t get me wrong, I know people abuse the system. Everyday. But let’s not to be quick to judge who we think is abusing the system and who isn’t.  White collar crime robs people of their life savings and financial independence. While the crimes of the rich are scandalized, they are also backed by government bailouts. So the rich still go home richer. But crimes of the poor are demonized, stereotyped, and perpetuated.

I’m overwhelmed because I turn one way and I face an endless body of knowledge amassed and indoctrinated to “fix” the human body.  So much knowledge that every day I learn more and go home realizing how much more I have to learn. I want to know it all and I feel as if everyday I’m falling farther and farther from that goal. And when I turn to the other side, I face a humanity so broken that no amount of medical knowledge that I learn can “fix”.  Ultimately, what I really want to “fix” is poverty and injustice. But I can’t learn that in a medical text book.

My heart wants to fulfill two overwhelmingly large and in many ways contradictory tasks. I know with time and patience, my dream of using my medical knowledge to, in some small way, stop injustice will come to fruition. 

But for now, I’m just overwhelmed.