Thursday, July 22, 2010

The World According to Dr. Knowitall

One day you’re going about your business, tending to your life and all of a sudden someone comes along and grabs you, takes all your clothes, all your money, puts you on an airplane and flies you into the middle of a foreign country where nobody speaks your language, nothing is familiar and a raging battle is taking place and that someone kicks you out of the cabin smack into the center of the battle. Bullets whizzing by your head, bombs exploding all around, debris flying and you’re in the middle of it stark naked with absolutely no protection and no way out. So what happens? Well your choices are minimal and let’s face it, in the chaos that ensues all around there’s not a whole hell of a lot of time to sit down and think about your options and reason out which is the best. You’ve had no training in warfare, you’ve had no training in self-preservation in the heat of a battle, you haven’t got the first clue what to do. The one and only thing you know is the drive to get out of there alive.

You look around and in your state of panic and high anxiety all you see is rocks. Rocks.  Choices do not abound – in fact the only choice you can see is the rock at your feet. You grab the rock. It’s a crude and unsophisticated weapon in the middle of high-powered rifles and bombs but it’s all you’ve got. So you use it and somehow it works, somehow you manage to – with incredible effort and energy use the damn rocks to defend yourself. And so you keep grabbing rocks. What else are you going to do?

Fast forward to six months later.  You wake up in a hospital bed in a quiet town far from the battle. You’re bandaged from head to toe because you were beaten and bloodied in a hundred places. Bones have been broken, eyes have been gouged, limbs may have been severed, internal organs have collapsed.

But you’re alive.

In walks Dr. Knowitall, Harvard Medical School, Chief of Trauma Surgery, credentials up the wazoo, drives a Mercedes, clean hands, clean fingernails, hair cut and coiffed, the envy of all his peers. Born and raised into money, had parents who put him through medical school and paid his bills while he studied and graduated top of his class, the dude knows his trade.  But war-zones? Yeah… not a clue.  Oh he's had to stitch up plenty of people that have been there but personally he never had the pleasure.

And as he inspects your wounds he says to you “oh my poor dear such a mess you are but you went about it all wrong. What you should have done was this, this and that and if you had only done this, this and that well then you wouldn’t be lying here in this sorry state you're in with all of these gaping wounds and facing years of difficult recovery. It’s so simple and you really ought to have known better.”

I'm such a mess.  Why didn't I know better?

Such a simple solution.  Why... Didn't... I... Know... Better?

2 comments:

  1. I could quite gladly murder the doctor who asks that.

    Why WOULD you have known better?

    And how the **** could someone who has never BEEN in a warzone be INSENSITIVE enough to DARE to ask such an arrogant question.

    Ugh.
    Hating Mr Know It All.

    x

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  2. Hi WS - fact is there are those who would berate themselves for not having known better and people who would suggest that the answer to such a situation is quite simple and one-dimensional.

    ReplyDelete