karya 

 REAL TIME HEROES

By: helter skelter

 

I have always enjoyed leafing through every edition of TIME magazine. My father has been a faithful subscriber since my primary school years up to now. But now, I had to limit myself to one copy each month because of the LE19 price tag. So I had to carefully select which edition to buy, based on the cover issue, because buying every week would translate into LE76 per month! For the month of November, I bought the first week edition as it was a “Global Health” issue, for reasons I’m sure you could guess. It turned out to be superb, compelling me to share with you, my dear colleagues, the reasons that it touched me so.

 

             At first glance, I thought it was the usual report on the world’s most dangerous diseases, with shocking statistics that make you gasp unbelievingly.

“One child dies of malaria in Africa every 29 seconds”

“Someone in the world dies of TB every 18 seconds”

“One person is infected with HIV every 6.4 seconds”

It is overwhelming if you imagine that behind each number is someone’s child, a mother, a father. But that was only half of it. The second half is what affected me most. Stories of perfectly ordinary people all over the world, doing what they can to battle these diseases, using meager resources, but achieving extraordinary results.

 

             Stories of motorcycle riders carrying medicine across roadless stretches of  Uganda. The survivors of refugee camps in Cambodia fighting TB. The ingenious doctor, providing grandmothers in Nepal with little bags of Vitamin A, fighting infant mortality and blindness. Backpack medics who slip from Thailand to Myanmar to deliver care village by village, risking arrest if they are found. A doctor braving a facedown with the Chinese government after exposing the spread of AIDS in a village was caused by a government campaign :  paying impoverished farmers to donate their blood using unsterilised needles.

 

             What is most remarkable is that each of them has found a way of contributing, in various ways, however small it may seems. We usually read of famous figures, showing public support for a certain cause. Some, like Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, (the father, not the son) even got over their past enmity. If you are Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, you give fantastic amounts of money, more than USD 1 billion this year alone. If you are Bono of U2, with a fan base numbering in millions, you shine your spotlight on problems that grow in the far corners of the world.

 

             You don’t have to be someone in the medical field to be deeply affected by these very real problems. In this era of globalization, we have to lose the “we’re safe, we’re far away”        illusion. For example, SARS began in Asia but caught a flight to Canada and killed people there. If TB is not properly treated in a poor country, and lead to the appearance of multiple drug resistant TB bacilli, doesn’t it spell big trouble to the rich nations as well, once it eventually spreads there? Is it fair that latitudes and longitudes determine the efficiency of treatment available? As if health care is not the most basic human right, to be delivered to each person at whatever the cost.

 

             When you remove the clouds and look at the bigger picture, your personal problems seem so trivial and mundane. There are many things awaiting you out there. Your input maybe the very thing needed to reach a solution. No matter what type of doctor you become, always strive to find a way to contribute, however small the role may be. Each life is valuable : saving the life of a laborer’s baby is as rewarding as saving the President of U.S.A. We make a living by what we get, Churchill said, but we make a life by what we give.

 

The first step of this long journey, is to survive and graduate from the medical faculty, preferably with honors, of course. Once the elusive “MD” title is yours, every window of opportunity is wide open, you only have to choose. To all my fellows, all the best, in all your exams J

Doctor     : Did you know that there are more than 1,000 bones in the human body?

Larry       : Shhh, doctor! There are three dogs outside in the waiting room!