The Unsavory Process of Making Doctors
Almost As Attractive As Making Sausage
Like most, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Abruptly leaving home at the wet age of eighteen due to an abusive step-father, I had no plan. Didn’t even know there was such a thing as a plan … color me aimlessly adrift in a vast sea of deep ignorance … try painting that!
Toiling away at factory jobs and laboring in the construction industry was my primitive survival strategy, but the heavy boredom factor kept me going back to school. While I didn’t know exactly what to be, I knew it wasn’t those.
As fate would have it, I was lucky enough to meet some fine folks who took a shine to me and were flexible enough to let me work part-time, alternating work days with class days, all of which would change with semesters. Utilizing this seat-of-the-pants approach I was able to squeeze four years of college into eight.
Towards the end of it, I still hadn’t made a career choice … just kept taking classes in subjects I found the most interesting, like biology and chemistry. That all changed in a blink when my lab partner returned from interviewing for medical school.
“How did it go, John?”
“Dude, you gotta apply to med school. You won’t believe the idiots they’re lettin’ in.”
Sure enough, your favorite idiot applied and got accepted. So with cowgirl wife and precious toddler in tow, it was off to Lubbock, home of the fighting Texas Tech Red Raiders and All Guns Up!
Leaving the lush, green rolling hills and thickety pines of east Texas for the stark brown, dry flatness of CapRock country was a real boot to the head, spurs and all. Apocalyptic dust storms did not help smooth the transition.
All that said, I soon learned to love the place, which was not far from Shallow Water, Brownfield and Muleshoe. Creative namers those tiny town founders were not, but the people of west Texas were some of the most genuine, friendly and kindest anywhere.
Well, except for the bar owners with a strict no-biker policy who threw me out because of my Harley-Davidson tee-shirt. Never mind that I had never had anything to do with a Harley … or that my dear mother had given me the shirt because she thought it was pretty, if not some gaudy, pink, biker bling.
Hey don’t hate, I was your prototypical dirt-poor med student who would have worn Josie and the Pussycats for the right price of zero. Eventually they offered to let me stay in the bar if I would turn the shirt inside-out. I respectfully declined, based on principles, those elusive things I figured I could someday afford to get.
❖
The first day of med school was an honest-to-god horror show, no way around it. They smartly put Gross Anatomy right up front on the curriculum schedule so as to shake out the weak hands, which worked to perfection. Out of about eighty, ten threw in the towel on day one. More would soon holler “Calf-rope!” and follow them out the door.
Can’t blame them … you descended into a freakish white tile/sterling steel basement reeking of formaldehyde to be confronted by twenty, waxy gray corpses getting cranked slowly up out of their shiny, metal holding tanks, dripping the juices of their pickling bath, ready to be dissected every way from Sunday by starry-eyed greenhorns with no measurable skills. It was surreal … or unreal … or both.
In the beginning we were all varying degrees of nauseated, but quickly adjusted, with some even choosing to eat lunch down there. I never got that comfy with it … my squeamish appetite bluntly refused to accompany me to such a macabre picnic.
Before the course began, we were given a very stern lecture about respecting the bodies of the generous people who had selflessly donated themselves to science. Even though we were clearly warned about the harsh consequences for such behavior, there were still those middling goofballs who would damn the rules and ethics to proceed full speed ahead with their stupid human tricks.
Early on, one of the dimmer bulbs passed slowly by our station with a wry smile and a rather indecorous body part in his lab coat pocket. Dr. Dimwit would then slither slyly around the lab, giving brief glimpses of his verboten prize, much to our utter shock and petrified surprise.
He got suspended, albeit only temporarily. Most of us felt like he should have been taken to the woodshed and then sent summarily home to ponder alternative careers like chicken herder or duck plucker.
I learned a lot about doctors that day and would be fully educated on them in the years to come. Don’t get me wrong … there are some very good docs out there who sincerely care about helping the patient. Sadly these are a tiny minority, as we learned from the CovidCon … when most of them fell right in line with the evil plan of executing the greatest Psychological Operation in history ... for money. It’s still hard to fathom the monumental avarice, mendacity and shame of it all. We’re gonna need a bigger woodshed, Quint.
The end result of course was the deadening and sickening of countless innocents, which continues to this day. We can only begin to talk about a great awakening once the Injection-from-Hell is banned, not recommended.
The silver lining of the scam is that now we know who those doctors are … and conversely the good ones who did not play the sinister game. Don’t even get me started on hospitals, all of which should have signs posted like the neighborhood swimming pool …
“No life guard on duty, enter at your own risk.”
Best of luck to all, especially those navigating the treacherous waters of so-called modern health care,
~~ Doc
“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”
~~ Erma Bombeck
On the other hand you eventually gained a shit-ticket that was worth the paper it was printed on and I'd hazard a guess, went on to a reasonably decent living, the nice suburban house with the picket-fence, adorable wife, 2.5 children, a car rather more upscale than a Chevy Impala and judging from what I've read by you, probably had far more concern and compassion for your patients then your assclown colleagues you so justly decry...
Or something like that, anyway... 🤔
I on the other hand took a degree in "Music Performance on Oboe"... after 13 years' unrelenting abuse in the public education gulag I chose music not because I thought I was any good at it; I thought it was the only thing I was any good at... I was one of the few graduates to get a gig as a professional musician, but three years later thanks to a drunken Master Warrant Officer's relentless malicious whispers and trap-setting I was kicked out of the military on about the lowest honorable release category they could find – and blacklisted from ever rejoining! Since then it's been a dreary procession of dead-end jobs, unemployment insurance and welfare... 40 years of it in point of fact, until on the strength of my discharge card I got my present job as a security guard and have been doing same for 11 years now... I'm now 66 years old, I can't afford to retire, I work full-time so my wife can work part-time so she can devote her time to caring for her multiply-lethally-injected 29 year-old daughter who as a consequence of same, will never again be well enough to work...
So a couple of thoughts in conclusion Dr. Austin?
1. I have often thought over the years that if the f***wads who comprised my University's teaching faculty had ever talked about what mattered, that degree might have saved my bacon if not my backside... You know, stuff like "professionalism" and "etiquette"; "time and priority management" and "personal presentation"? As it was, it was 6 years down the toilet for nothing, wasted on worthless shit like "16th-century counterpoint" or Arnold Schönberg's "12-tone-technique" ... to the detriment of stuff like "listening to music" or "practicing"... 🙄💩
And 2: Count your blessings.
This brings to mind movies like "Gross Anatomy" and "Vital Signs" where we see the Holly-weird version of going through medical school.
One of the things we learned through Covid is that the higher the education, the more the indoctrination. Through that lens, I look and have looked back at my life and the failures that come with it with a different perspective. In elementary school, I saw school as a necessary evil. At times, throughout the year, I would feign sickness in order to stay home and watch morning television and get a "feeling" for life outside the state-run halls.
Most of school was learning fill-in-the-blank facts, but never questioning them, getting enough math training to make proper change, and also find art and drawing as a non-disruptive way to counter the downtime of school (it was quite boring).
In high school, I was a C-level student. My dad knew that I was lazy. But now I think I just didn't want to put in the work to conform. I still have that, and there is a part of me that bears myself up about it.
Throughout my life, I thought, and still think, that I have yet to find my tribe. I've had jobs that didn't take, and I've been part of groups that didn't work out. And I've asked, "What is wrong with me? There are people out there who seem to negotiate the 9-5 world pretty well. There are people who have their marriage, their kids, and their two-car garage. I even had a dream in my head of that ideal.
If you had asked me in 2018 what I wanted out of life, I think it would have been "to be left alone." And then 2020 hit, and the people that told me about the orange man bad, suddenly told me to stay home/stay safe and wear the damn mask.
I didn't mind staying home so much, but telling me to wear something on my face didn't make any sense. I also lived under the auspices that there were grownups still in public health and government and I thought that after 15 days to stop the spread...we'd snap back to normal.
How's that for Dunning Kruger
In October of 2021 I suffered diabetic cellulitis and had a leg amputation, and in my four months recovery, I got to see a lot of hospitals in both doctors and nurses. I saw the ones that were there for a paycheck, and the ones that really cared. And I saw the throughline of indoctrination.
Some assert that COVID is exactly as the narrative claims it is. Others told me there was a wing of the hospital where the vaccine-injured were placed. All I know is, the rules for masking were arbitrary and capricious even in a hospital setting. Inside a room, even one with an open door, patients didn't have to wear masks. But if you went into a hall...mask up.