An Appreciation For Medical Science And Care

[quicksand]

I'm a huge klutz! So it's no surprise to my friends and family that my when my six-foot, two-hondo frame doesn't always maneuver too well in this world and takes a spill. Which is quite often I am afraid.

 

Like this morning for example. While making a run to Perry road spring for water (a true, local natural treasure because our condo water is just foul), I took a nice face-plant and dive on the ice making hamburger out of my left palm. I look like I was attacked by a large toothy mammal, and the wind was knocked out of me pretty hard. Here's something embarrassing about me - blood makes me faint. Faint bad. I had that deep purple blood. Not good. Big wimp. Busted.

 

Fast forward and my wife finally gets bloodied me to the ER room after dragging me from work. (I thought I could work regardless. Ha ha.) While I was laying on the gurney, not loving the local anesthetic shots being administered, I couldn't help but feel enormous appreciation for the medical research and care I received from a very professional and personal staff at OMHS. I was appreciative for the things like a gurney as precision as an instrument as the doctors probes or the nurses cleaning equipment, which she throughly cleaned the dirt and gravel from my wounds which were deeply and stubbornly embedded. But tools as useless without the training of the people who wield them. My nurses and the doctor had years of training which made my pain more manageable knowing that these complete strangers I could rely on their training above all.

 

Anyway, being the unapologetic atheist jack-ass that I am, I always find it quixotic - if not downright ungracious, when some sick person thanks God while ignoring the contribution that medical science for the care they receive when they are cured or fixed up. Like excuse me, but are you ignorant of the slow and painful advances we've made in medical science since the days of the classical Greeks? Medical science really didn't take off until after the Civil War and antibiotics, if I recall, didn't become a part of care until WWII.

 

That's why I thank the academy of sciences and the people who have studied how the body works and how to fix it. I also acknowledge the sacrifices of countless people through the millennium who unfortunately became the subjects of study and the target of trial and error. People did all heavy lifting, God did nothing. People innovated their own relief, and where was God? Yeah, at church or playing games with the "image" of Mary in cheese sandwiches and grease stains.

 

It seems not only is God proficient at receiving the credit for other's hard work, he's also very good at only providing arcane knowledge that only does you good if you adhere to some idiosyncratic doctrine and only after you're dead of course. Please.

 

Typing with one hand sucks so I just sign off and say thank you humanity, thank you medical science, and thank you medical professionals.

 

All the credit is yours.

 

 

 

(And special thanks to my wife for taking care of me. You are the best!)

[Thackerie]

You are a brave and valiant man — and a much better typist than me — for setting all that out single-handedly. I agree with your essay.

 

Like you, I am an atheist. It took me a long time to admit to myself that I had gone beyond mere agnosticism years ago and sincerely do not believe in that big grouchy old man in the sky who gets off on fear, pain and death and is all too interested in what humans do with their genitalia.

 

Nevertheless, I do have a few words for god when I fall and hurt myself (which is more often than for most people since I have been crippled with multiple sclerosis). That is, I cuss the old bastard out soundly. Pardon my language, but "fuck god" has become my name for this deity, as in, when following an ouchie, I say, "Thank you, fuck god, you stupid jerk."

 

Yeah, I know it's silly to tell off a non-existent thing that I haven't actually believed in for 30 years. But, I figure if it gets credit for good stuff that it did nothing to attain, it might as well get blamed for all the bad stuff, too. Plus, it invariably makes me feel better.

 

Any way, thank you for posting. I hope your recuperation is going well.