Stethescopes and Monkey Wrenches

The mechanic and the doctor have a lot in common. I drove my car to the Ford dealership yesterday because it has been acting kind of "funny". I parked, walked inside, and approached the man at the counter. He asked me, "What brings you in to see us today?". I told him my car had been acting strangely and he said, "Tell me more about that". After we discussed the various sounds and went through how long it had been acting this way, how consistently, where the sounds were coming from, how it handled certain situations, etc, he said "We'll get someone to take a look at it and run a diagnostic. We should have something to tell you in a few hours." Shaking my head in confusion, I went and sat down in the customer lounge with a strange and familiar feeling.

I despise dealing with my car. When it doesn't work properly, I just want someone to fix it. Don't explain to me how it works, why it doesn't seem to be working right now, or try to convince me that I need a different vehicle. Just fix it and fix it now. I wonder how many patients feel that way when they come to the doctor's office. They don't really want to know why they're sick, they just want the cure and the sooner, the better. Of course, I've never heard a doctor trying to convince a patient that they needed a new body but maybe that's something for the future. I can hear it now "Ms. X, you really should think about that heart transplant because, at this rate, replacing your heart just might get you another ten years on your current liver (Wink, nudge)".

Each of us can find a connection to other people through our careers. And some of us even enjoy being on the other side of our jobs from time to time. I know that I enjoy sitting back and being the patient. When I go the doctor, I don't tell them that I'm a medical student unless I'm asked directly. Some people just don't get that. "Why not?" they ask. It's simple. I find a comfort in letting someone take care of me and take the wheel for a little bit. It's a relief not to think about what I should do for myself or the mechanism behind my aches and pains. And who wants to be quizzed about the top bacterial causes of sinusitis when you're suffering from your own sniffles?

When the mechanic was done, he promptly reminded me that there's another thing the auto shop and the doctor's office have in common. After his diagnosis and treatment recommendations, he turned to me and said, "That'll be $100."

Suddenly, I felt nauseous.

Time

Time. It's a mysterious and frightening thing. As a species, we've given it life. We mark it out in seconds, months, millennia. We say it marches on, stands still, flies and even loops back onto itself. We've given it a face (father time), say that it laughs at us, and even has a memory. There have been books about it, movies made to explore its nature and its temperament, poems composed in honor of it's faithfulness and consistency.

The bible begins with a discussion of time, giving humanity a place to start, and it concludes with an extensive look at time's end. For such a widely discussed and explored concept, we still seem to know very little and we continue to be surprised by the multitude of ways that time can cause us trouble, joy, and catch us off balance. I've been thinking a lot about time lately.

None of us know how much time we've each been allotted. Some of us have a good idea that we may have less than others but, of course, only God knows for sure. I was in clinic yesterday with an eight year old boy and we were waiting for the attending physician to come back. There is an interactive activity center on the wall with the moon that you can make orbit the Earth and a space ship that you can turn so that it faces other planets in the solar system. When you turn the ship towards a planet, an opening in the bottom of the ship tells you how many days are in a year on that particular planet and how far it is from the sun. The boy started reading the numbers and asking me to help him figure out how long it would take to get to certain planets if you started from the sun. He pulled out some chalk and I got out my phone so we could use the calculator on it. Writing on the chalk board, we figured that it would take about 55 years to drive from the sun to the Earth if you went 210 miles per hour for 24 hours a day/ 365 days a year. We did the calculation for other planets and it dawned on me that no matter what planet we did the calculation for, we were still measuring by Earth time. He asked me, "If we moved to Venus, do you think we'd still care about our birthday's?" That question took me by surprise. I thought about that for a long, long time.