Burning, burning...

©FG

You tell yourself the citizens of the country sponsored your medical studies. With a fragment of the cost of what you really need to pay, for peanuts, you got a degree. Of course, it was no easy walk in the park on your part, either. All that midnight vigil, the missed outings with buddies and the humiliations at work by seniors later on in life were your sacrifices. You were convinced that your job description would read as crucial as a bomb disposal unit. Your vocation would turn the direction of the country, it seemed. Not to forget the stresses and guilty feelings that haunted you as your patients died in your tour of duty. You can but not complain about your predicament as it was entirely your decision to plunge head in. Some reverence comes with the job, nevertheless.

Those, however, were too few and far between. The same hands that express gratitude to you would be the same ones that point accusatory charges against you. You thought they were placing you on a dais like they do to their Gods, right? When they deified you, they meant you are supposed to be infallible, and when things go south through no fault of yours, they cannot blame God, so they blame you.

If you feel it is unfair to bear the brunt of such responsibility on your tiny shoulders, by all means, move on. They are others who would gladly take over until they, too, burned out.

You are expected to do what you say and say what you do. You are just a spoke in the wheel of life. Others can use you and abuse you. But you cannot. They can be dishonest or lie through their teeth to your face. They can connive to get a big profit out of you. They can make fraudulent claims. No, siree, you cannot do any of that. You are supposed to be the paradigm of virtue. It does not matter if businessmen abuse your good office to enrich themselves. After all, they have their eyes on the money, and you have yours on the soul. So you like to believe...

(P.S. The whole equation gets distorted when the medical studies are self-financed. It is no more of paying back to society but back to the coffers. Sometimes it is an investment. Altruism rarely is in the picture.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.