Читать книгу Lion in the Night - Jack Armstrong - Страница 6

A physician’s life might be viewed as hard and demanding or blessed, depending on one’s perspective. Certainly the intense training period is hard and demanding, lasting over a decade past college for some physicians. Adding to the work demands is the natural and trained desire to never make a mistake in diagnosis or treatment that adds to a patient’s suffering.

So how is a physician’s life blessed? Blessed is he by the permission granted by patients to enter into their lives at the most private, personal, and deepest levels. This permission is granted in part from the patient’s need to understand and treat their illness, but also in part from trust earned from years of confident interaction. With this trust the physician may be witness to extraordinary courage, dramatic events, and remarkable challenges, often in far-away places.

The extraordinary people who speak to you in these stories have a truth to tell. Some of these truths are spoken, but others are acted out in the caldron of everyday life. As witness to these truths, I hope to convey the patients’ stories—and mine—to add a new lens to the reader’s eye into the meaning of life.

Remember, my readers, these stories are 100 percent fiction and 99 percent true.