A Good Day

Tuesday, S, W and A came in. They are migraine patients. Everyone had a success story. They have had horrible, intractable, disabling headaches. But with treatment they are doing very well right now. One of them had forty-three years of headache which "was lifted". She is very happy, because I am apparantly "a miracle worker". I had praise from W and from A also. They are thankful, happy patients. O was here. He is eighty five, crusty, tough and very successful. He lived his own way. He is my complete patient. I have to do his primary care. "You are my doctor". He won't go to an internist. I have explained to him that he would get better care with someone who is an expert in general care, but he won't go anywhere else. He has had a stroke. He still gets himself out in the garden every day. He strongly believes that there is no better doctor for him to see, even for primary care. L called on the phone. She feels great. I have been slowly removing her Parkinson's drugs which she has taken the last five years. She was diagnosed by another physician in another place with Parkinson's which she doesn't have. People love to feel better. They love to have health improved through the wonders of modern medicine. They want the suffering to decrease, or to stop. A doctor has the power to do that sometimes.
Work is good. Work is always good. It gives us meaning and productivity. It makes us feel that we have personal importance. It allows us to give our own personal contribution to the world. Work is what gives us meaning. When I say this, I also mean "work" involved in the care of others: children, spouses, family, friends, countrymen, and people in the world. Giving money to the victims of living in Africa where someone comes and burns the village and rapes the girls who are ten and cuts the achilles tendons of the men. That is "work" also. That is the work of taking care of our fellow man.
Some people think they can't work. That's because they don't have a paying "job". It is very hard. They think they lack value and meaning. They lack money, which is another thing that is good. But they have a wrong perception. They can't see what work really is. Work is not about money (which is nice). It is about the feeling that comes from success. Success can seem to be in a creation. I might be a builder. Then, I think that when I have finished building a building I have succeeded. I might be a banker who thinks when I have created wealth I have succeeded. But these thoughts are incomplete. Why does this mean there is success? Because a building helps people to live and work, things which are hard to do outside there is success. Because when we create wealth someone has more money and possibly more happiness (or more money to send to Africa or wherever). The "success" in reality is the possibilty of helping someone. Work is a form of socialization. The ants of the colony, who are just like us, work so that the other ants in the colony can survive.
It's amazing to be able to do what we do with our skills. It's amazing to see what we've created. We have jet planes and sky scrapers and cell phones. We have computers. And for me, we have medicine. The ants don't get all of that. Even most of the people in the world don't get that. They can't even get medicine.
In South Africa, there was a company who made AIDS drugs generically. They were sued by about fifty different pharmaceutical companies for intellectual rights patent infringements. South Africa supported its right to make these drugs. They wanted to do this because in some areas almost all of the people are dying with AIDS. They can't afford the drugs. So they wanted to make them cheaply. South Africa ended up losing "most favored nation" status with the US, which costs a lot of money for the country due to trading priviledges. So the South Africans don't get medicine. And I'm lucky to be here because I get to use medicines for MIGRAINES! Never mind life-saving AIDS drugs. I'm actually able to help get rid of migraines, so how lucky is that?
Good days are important. They need to be noticed, savoured and remembered.