I get this look sometimes. This exact look. The eyes squint. The brow furrows, and the head starts the slowest of shakes. It's like he's trying to say to me "What planet are you from?" I gulped awkwardly and my voice cracked like a prepubescent boy as I nodded. "It's a proven scientific fact", I said. The look remained, and I gulped awkwardly again.
Hisham's car was randomly targeted and riddled by what he told me were a hundred bullets. Four of them found his chest, legs and arms, and so he came to us. After he was stabilized, it was my task to go and find out if any "slow killers" had been missed and to do a check to see how he was doing. In the course of our conversation, Hisham told me that he smoked a pack a day, and had smoked that much since his teens. I told him that cigarettes were harmful to his health, and that he was at risk for all sorts of heart problems, strokes, and cancers in the long term. That's when Hisham - two bullets and a dozen pieces of shrapnel still inside him - gave me The Look.
"It is.." I said again, insisting ".. proven.." I feel like shit.
Another time, I was examining a woman with Hepatitis - a problem with the liver caused by an infection. She and her three brothers had fallen ill with the same thing after drinking a particularly smelly batch of water. I knew where they were from before even asking - I had drank this water when I was in Sadr City last year. It smells so clearly of sewage that people put spices in it such as cardamon to cover up the taste. She lived with all of her family in a small room with one lightbulb which she says hasn't been lit in a week due to the power outages. I told her she should drink cleaner water as though she had a choice. Again the look. Again, I felt like shit.
When I was describing how all of this felt to one of my friends from back home, he gave me an article by Peter Kropotkin - a turn of the century anarchist - to read, specifically pointing to the following:
Let us suppose you intend to be - a doctor. Tomorrow a man in corduroys will come to fetch you to see a sick woman. He will lead you into one of those alleys where the opposite neighbors can almost shake hands over the heads of the passersby; you ascend into a foul atmosphere by the flickering light of a little illtrimmed lamp; you climb two, three, four, five flights of filthy stairs, and in a dark, cold room you find the sick woman, lying on a pallet covered with dirty rags. Pale, livid children, shivering under their scanty garments, gaze at you with their big eyes wide open. The husband has worked all this life twelve or thirteen hours a day at, no matter what; now he has been out of work for three months. To be out of employ is not rare in his trade; it happens every year, periodically. But, formerly, when he was out of work his wife went out a charwoman - perhaps to wash your shirts - at the rate of fifteen pence a day; now she has been bedridden for two months, and misery glares upon the family in all its squalid hideousness.
What will you prescribe for the sick woman, doctor - you who have seen at a glance that the cause of her illness is general anemia, want of good food, lack of fresh air? Say, a good beefsteak every day? a little exercise in the country? a dry and well-ventilated bedroom? What irony! If she could have afforded it this would have been done long since without waiting for your advice ... What will you say to all these sick people? Recommend them generous diet, change of air, less exhausting toil... You only wish you could but you daren't and you go out heartbroken, with a curse upon your lips.
A hundred twenty five years after he wrote his paper, Kropotkin described me, right down to the quiet cursing. The gist of his argument (aside from preaching Socialism) is that - when faced with these circumstances - we have two choices: to be of "those miserable natures who adapt themselves to anything, who at the sight of the most revolting spectacles console themselves with a gentle sigh and a glass of sherry, then ... gradually become used to these contrasts, and ... [whose] sole idea will be to lift [themselves] into the ranks of the pleasure-seekers, so that [they] may never again find [themselves] among the wretched"; or to "return home one day saying to [ourselves], 'No, it is unjust; this must not go on any longer'".
tarek : )