Taking you down one notch at a time

I live in a medical world. I work at a medical center, I do freelance work for two different medical companies, I have several physicians who attend to my own medical needs and I have friends who have elected to become doctors.

It’s been those friends who have set the standards for what I think of doctors. I remember being a year or two out of college at my friend Mike’s house and another friend, Jason (one of the many to come in and out of my life) was talking about his medical school interviews. He had been doing various internships (in morgues) and exploring summer work abroad to learn a little about alternative medicine. The thing that killed me about Jason, and ultimately ended up killing our friendship a few years later, was how he turned into a complete egomaniac as soon as he started talking about being a doctor. I called him out on it, because what else are friends for, and he told me he needed to be a egomaniac. He said, and I am paraphrasing here because it was too long ago for me to remember his exact words, “I need to be egotistical. As a doctor I will be having control over people lives – whether they live or die. You can’t take on that kind of responsibility without having ego. How else could you keep convincing yourself you could do the job?”

For a while I accepted that. For like 2 seconds.

I respect my doctors the same way I respect my mechanic, the woman who rings me up at the grocery, the man who drives my shuttle bus at work. I respect anyone who does their job and does it well. I don’t think anyone is better than me and I don’t respect anyone more than I respect myself. No one deserves that.

So, as a personal rule, I call doctors by their first names. It’s the absolute quickest way to deal with them as an equal. On occasion I run into a doctor, as I did just the other day, who played the prick card and makes me feel small. I haven’t gotten to a place where I never am reduced to feeling itty bitty, but I am working on it.

Tonight I am meeting a doctor for the first time, not for work but for my own medical needs, and we’ll see how it goes.

Her name is Elizabeth.