Flee The Medical Profession

 

Virus

Part 20 of 30

I'm giving a big shout-out to all the doctors, nurses, orderlies, and med aides out there helping us in this terrible time of Virus. You’ve been great and it hasn’t gone unnoticed that in many ways you’re risking your own good health for the benefit of others. I believe I know how you feel, “Damn Hippocrates and his stinking oath! I could’ve been an architect, or a plumber, and when a pipe goes bad you unscrew it and put in a new one! We’re not trying to save the stupid pipe; it has a lifespan and when it’s over it’s over!”

True, true. But quite foolishly you chose the foolish path anyway -- it’s terrible the ideals we dream up when we’re kids -- and now it’s too late to start over in plumbing school. It’d take an awful lot of bad pipes and a lot of misery catering to homeowners trying to talk you down to a bare nothing just to pay off your medical school debts. Not to mention your embarrassment with parents, loved ones, and your easily depressed children, vulnerable little anemics: “I thought Mommy was a healer...boo hoo.”

OK, we get it, you’re stuck in a rut. And the politics of the profession, along with the reputation of the hospital -- run by cutthroats that thankfully the rest of us never deal with -- is all at stake. And you shall do this dirty business during the Virus because you have no real choice. Say you didn’t have parents, friends, children, etc., you'd really have some options for escaping, disappearing one night and going somewhere. Say everyone knows you’re from up north, you go south, and vice versa depending on how tricky you think it’d be. Then you find an aged plumber, befriend him, and use your medical skills to somehow off his wife and children sequentially and with real stealth, and you take over the business.

But the complications are obvious. It’s like a surgery, where it’s tough to mess up, especially with witnesses, and scalpels bugged with microphones and tiny cameras recording every little thing. You’ve been so pent up with the Virus that it’s easy to go out drinking, then show up the next day -- the place overwhelmed with the Virus and yourself overwrought with worries and all these “I coulda been a plumber” regrets. It’s too much for anyone, especially with the do-gooder reputation you’re supposed to have.

Then there’s the drugs, and that’s a biggie. Pharmaceuticals, I believe is one of the in-group code-words for it. Maybe you can escape tomorrow with a little dose of something, a little mind nookie for a bad day, who’s gonna know? They’re not filming you at home. And say you unscrewed that light in the backyard, you could vanish anywhere, as long as you can shimmy over the concrete blocks stacked up between yourself and the street with the broken streetlight. Then stop by a bar and try to get in in with the real pharmacy. Now you’re lost in your own reverie, Virus be damned! See that? You’re not as trapped as you thought you were. Let the world deal, you’re free!