Lawyers

When I started medical school, I felt fairly ambivalent about lawyers. Then I got served papers in a lawsuit my intern year in which some lawyer made me sound like a truly evil sort seeking to inflict pain and misery on the world. I no longer felt ambivalent about lawyers. The lawsuit was dropped pretty quickly, but the feelings were still there.

Sometimes I think that God arranges things just to show us some of the rough edges we have in our attitudes. A month or so ago, I was on call. I got a call from the ER doctor asking me to come down and evaluate a patient. Apparently my intern who usually fielded such calls first was no longer responding to pages. I trudged down to the ER and looked at the labs and radiographic images. All of these studies looked fairly grim, and I guessed that the patient probably had a year to live at most.

I went to retrieve the chart from the ER doctor. "Oh, by the way," he said, "you ought to know that this guy is a prominent medical malpractice attorney." Something in my heart remembered all of the false things that someone like this man had written about me, and it rebelled at the thought of dealing with this patient.

However, I went and talked to him and examined him. By the end of it all, I just wanted to cry. Here was a man in his prime to whom I had just given the worst news of his life.

Friday there was a very nice card from him in my mailbox thanking me for my empathy and work on his case. I feel better about lawyers now. I suspect the Lord probably arranged his visit to the ER and my intern's lack of response to his pages just so that I could get loosen up on a little bit of unresolved feelings in my heart.