Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 32

Dr. Kimberly Allison, a young pathologist whose specialty is studying breast cells under a microscope, got breast cancer. The unkindest cut of all was that the diagnosis came while she was still nursing her second child. Dr. Allison wrote the book Red Sunshine about her experience. One thing she covers is how becoming a cancer patient changed the way she relates to patients. They can never again be just cells on a slide.

An excellent movie on how becoming the cancer patient can transform the way a physician relates to patients is The Doctor starring William Hurt. Hurt plays Dr. Jack McKee, a highly successful, self-absorbed, swashbuckling surgeon who cannot wait to cut into the next patient. He taught one star-struck resident: “Get in. Fix it. Get out. I’d rather you cut straight, and care less. The surgeon’s job is to cut.”

Then the great physician McKee got a malignant throat tumor. Part of his larynx had to be removed.

Dr. McKee changed the way he trained residents and visited patients. The most influential event in his transformation came after a dying young woman told him a parable about a farmer who kept all the birds and creatures away from his crops with traps and fences. The farmer was very successful, but he was also very lonely. So one day he stood in the middle of his fields from dawn to dusk, his arms outstretched, to welcome the animals. Not a single creature came. They were terrified, you see, of the farmer’s new scarecrow.

Then the young woman set the dagger: “Dear Jack, just let down your scarecrow arms and we’ll all come to you.”17

Power may be the great aphrodisiac, but vulnerable love is still life’s most effective counter to loneliness and death.