“Smelly cat, smelly cat, what are they feeding you? Smelly cat, smelly cat, it’s not your fault.” A wise woman named Phoebe Buffay once said this. Actually, she said it numerous of times throughout the television series, Friends. “How does this pertain to medicine?”, you might ask. Well, the metaphor might not wholly be apparent, but in my head, I envision the smelly cat being a patient. At face value, you see a sick organism, but when you deprive it from its putrid smell, you find that it’s an organism that wants to be loved with a will to live. In human medicine, you get to see sick individuals as a doctor, and through treating them and getting to know them, you give these individuals a chance to be heard and continue living their lives. Through scribing and personal experience, I can tell you of three distinct individuals who have significantly …show more content…
For this reason, I continue to say that medicine can give second chances, as using the word does invites a naïve misrepresentation of medicine. As I sit and share this story to my fraternity brothers, one quickly attacked by saying, “Well, doctors make a lot of money, so it’s totally worth it.” But while I may sit in a mansion or drive a Maserati, the cases like the death of Cat A or the continued struggle of Cat B will continue to make me question my ability as a doctor or even the reason for staying in medicine if eventually everyone you treat will eventually die. I sit, and I think of my grandfather. I can never repay the nurses and doctors who took care of him. But when I think back and remembered talking to my grandfather’s neurologist, he told me, “Work hard. There are going to be struggle days, but the seventy to seventy-five percent of the rest of the days, the satisfaction of helping your patient will outweigh the rest.” Without this neurologist, a smelly cat would just be a smelly cat and nothing