WINTER 2022

As the trappings of the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons emerge around us in North America, things look and feel quite different for our colleagues serving around the world. For cross-cultural missionaries serving far from home, this time of year is complicated.

As is often the case, this quarterly column is heavily dependent on my current reading. This time it is Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Healthcare professionals are being pressured into all sorts of actions, actions which make them uncomfortable and undermine their deepest commitment to the good of the patient.

During my surgical training, I helped care for an aging professor who bemoaned his declining health. His mind still moved in academic circles, pondering the high points of chemistry and physics, but arthritis had so fused the bones in his neck that he couldn’t nestle into a pillow anymore.

When a medical code alert went off, my team took the stairs and not the elevators to save us precious seconds in the resuscitation. A “good” intern, I learned, gets their notes done as soon as possible.

As those called to the healing profession, we have all lived and practiced through old and unprecedented new challenges in our careers. We can all agree the last few years have surely been unlike any we have ever experienced before in our lives.