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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.

My experience as a front-line doctor in a 3rd World Country, an essay initially posted on the Motte subreddit as I was delirious from an ortho rotation tied with gyne for the worst months of my life. I'm still proud that the original prompted Scott himself to show up in the sub to respond with positive encouragement! (In the unlikely event he's reading this, I'm doing much better, it's a wonder what working in a service with a budget more than lost change behind the couch can do haha).

Was it fucking awful? If you're someone who doesn't particularly like reading (what are you doing here again?), then yes, it was fucking awful, and I struggle to imagine an American/Western doc will see anything this bad unless they volunteer for a mission to Haiti or some other hell-hole. Still better than working in the ER during a war, but all the worse for being a represenation of the status-quo for a billion people who can't afford better.

I'm not a soft person, but my heart is thoroughly sclerosed after the whole ordeal, not that I suffer from anything like PTSD or the like. Humans can get used to almost anything, and fast.

While I didn't see the kind of shit that you saw, I saw a different flavor of shit for a month as an Eaglelandian medical student. Terminally ill children, and kids in crisis from sickle cell anemia. Working conditions were good to excellent: 9 to 5, sometimes a four-hour weekend shift. Emotionally: I write about this a lot, but can't do it justice. It was ordinary dumbfucks in hell: most parents, even good ones, just fuck 'dealing with terminally ill child' up mildly to moderately bad. Only maybe five or ten percent of the parents weren't - as the doctors and nurses judged them - weren't some flavor or other of bush league dipshit or dumbass.

I will say that I did not have a traumatic or emotionally difficult or even unpleasant experience! If forced to rate it: 4/10, mildly unpleasant but I don't regret having done it, nor would I mind doing it again.

With war - although I've never been - I think that the thing at play is constant personal, physical danger, seeing your friends killed, and maybe a bit of moral injury from making mistakes in war that cost people their lives. In the cancer ward, there were a lot of eyes on things and relatively few (maybe 1x/week/attending at most) opportunities to make minor fuckups and kill patients.

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