What To Say?

The first week of y hospital training is done. The three days that I was on duty, one thing kept bothering me. What will I tell patients? How will I be a compassionate doctor without sacrificng my decisiveness? So I thought, I will tell you folks verbatims about doctors instructions and dialogues with patients that helps me learn and become better Christian doctors.

Like the first night I was on duty, there came a patient who was drunk. He kept demanding doctors to come attend to him even after he was attended to and was already stabilized. How can a doctor refuse his pestering demands so that the doctor can attend to other patients, without being impolite to the drunk patient? Here, the doctor was very firm but gently said that "I already attended to you, talked to you but it seems you are drunk and unable to comprehend well. Now I have to attend to other patients." Simple, firm but still polite. Yet, the drunk patient still kept complaining and demanding that the doctor talk to him and attend to him. One thing I learned, a doctor need not be too polite to heed to every patient request. One must also learn to refuse and follow one own judgement especially if there are other important matters to attend to (not that the drunk patient was unimportant but that other patients are important to attend to as well). Simple logic, but sometimes difficult to practice especially when you are overtaken by annoyance and anger to persistent patients.

Looking from the other side

The last three years have been an exciting journey for me. I was given the oppurtunity to see the theology from an academic perspective. It was also a time for me to learn about church people's theology. And as I try to find and learn more about the intersection of theology and medicine, I will be looking from the other side of the equation. The next five years will be a journey into the medical field as I train to be a surgeon. I hope you will journey with me as I try to find where God is and how God works in the medical field, among the sick and the dying. I hope we will all enjoy and learn in this new exciting oppurtunity.