Doctor Stew Cardigans is one of the most popular medical practitioners in my home town. He knows so much about body ailments, things that cause people sleepless nights and many more.People are willing to pay thousands of pounds to come and listen to doctor Stew, he is so knowledgeable eloquent and talented in his consulting field, in fact you won’t remember the exorbitant amount you have paid for as soon as you start listening to him talk, when you stay with him for two hours it looks like two minutes.
When you have a serious injury, he makes you feel like you have a small cut, when you have been ailing for days, he makes you feel like you are going to get well tomorrow, when he starts to speak to you, you feel that you are already healed, you quickly forget your pain and suffering.
However many other doctors are asking patients to do strange things these days, once before they asked my grandmother to stretch her arms and legs 180 degrees twice a day, to swing them round and round like rotor blades, in the morning and in the night before going to bed. This they say will reduce the body aches she has been experiencing every day. One afternoon I saw her in the Veranda in a pajamas trying to do a head stand, “GRANDMA! WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU WILL BREAK YOUR NECK!” I exclaimed, “My personal physician advised me to do vertical elevations and Horizontal Elevations, then diagonal boarding technique so as to increase blood flow to the entire blah! Blah! Blah!….” she answered.
One day I asked doctor Stew about these difficult things , I like Doctor stew because of the way he makes difficult things easy for me, when I am speaking to him, it’s like I am talking to my friend Jimmy, he can never confuse you.
“So doctor, what are these small animals I hear the nurse talking about, she said that they are the ones that entered my food and made me ill. She gave me a teaspoon of some liquid and asked me to drink, she further explain it will kill them soon and I will be well again. I have been vomiting badly recently. They say that they are so small that ordinary people like me cannot see them, only very educated doctors with glasses can clearly see them. “They are not called small animals,” said Doctor Stew as he chuckles, “The correct word there should be Microorganisms, they are tiny living things but technically cannot be refereed to as real animals, anyways you can call them whatever you like,” he added
Then a more terrifying piece of information came, she said, “these creatures are in many shapes and sizes, each very different from the other, They are everywhere, in water in the soil, in the air, on the floor, and even on this table you are leaning onto,” on hearing that, at once I let go of the table then began to stare at the palms of my hands, but I couldn’t see anything, just the way the nurse had said.
It’s those small bugs that get into our foods, our drinking water and make us sick, they have strange long and funny names, and many of those I can’t pronounce them properly.
Each news that comes seems to be worse than the one that came before it.
“They are the ones that enter people’s bodies and make them sick,” he continued, “is there a way we can kill them all at once, so that they won’t cause us any more trouble?” “No that’s not possible, it’s absolutely impossible” he remarked, “Can they kill us also?” I continued to ask astonishingly, “but there is good news also,” he said calmly, the good news is that our bodies have huge reserves of armies that fight off these plaguing animals, although they are always outnumbered, most of the time they win the victory, unless the enemy is too powerful. When the body is invaded from the outside, they form a huge defense wall around the enemy and try to crush it on the spot, because if they manage to reach the body’s vital organs they can cause further damage, and kill someone instantly.
I said this to doctor Stew, “there’s a lot of appalling images on the walls and inside the medical journals placed on the table, how do you bear the sight of these horrifying images with your staff, if these are the things you look at every single day of your life, then I choose never to become a medic.”
I once asked Doctor Cardigans, “which is the most important organ in the body, is it the heart, the liver or the kidneys?” “There is none that is more important than the other,” he replied. All organs are equally important, though there might be some that do more work than others, there is none that can exist without the other. Every tiny single cell in your body has a purpose that gives it value and makes it different from all the others, you remind me of some fellows who were here a while ago,” they asked me almost a similar question. They wanted to know my opinion of which was the worst illness in the world and the least dangerous, all diseases are bad for the human body and there is no way you can sort them out on a graphical scale, even a simple cold if not watched carefully can be extremely dangerous. What may vary could be its widespread coverage in given populations, say the outbreak of a pandemic.
People also have this notion that if you are a medic, you are never supposed to get sick, or contact the common tropical diseases, when they hear you have contracted a common avoidable communicable disease, they mock you instead of sympathizing with you because you are a great professional in the medical field. It never crosses their mind that you are just any other human being vulnerable to infections and development of chronic diseases.
Even if you tell them science does not cure all diseases, they still would persist with their interrogation, “how did you, a renowned medic contract such an avoidable illness?” they ask.
They act as if they don’t know that whenever an epidemic breaks out some of the medics who have volunteered to help treat the infected and assisted the affected are sometimes added to the list of casualties by the epidemic itself. When you tell them I am really sick please help they won’t believe you.
When patients ask, “why have drugs become so damn expensive?” in the doctor’s reply to this he says, “well yeah the guy who manufactures drugs does it with the mentality of selling it, the chemist then buys it and sells it at a profit, by the time the drug reaches the patient, its price had risen by tenfold, how then can you expect healthcare to be cheap if everything else in life is made expensive? You know drugs are simply for business?”
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