How can you regret helping a suffering patient?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.
I lost a very dear friend who lived with AIDS for about 17 years. Rejecting early treatments that were iffy, he thought he saved himself. I really miss him a lot.
Since my accident I am a little more mindful of the suffering of other people.
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Suffering is a kind of ecstasy in a way. Having pain all the time makes me terribly, terribly grateful for every moment I've got.
When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.
It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.
But my experience is that people who have been through painful, difficult times are filled with compassion.
When the patient loves his disease, how unwilling he is to allow a remedy to be applied.
Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.