the glory and the horror

Written Tuesday evening:

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I just saw the ER from two weeks ago (the one before Halloween) where Gallant has that one lady (the “frequent flier”) die because he didn’t stand up strongly enough to the cardiologist during the consult. Gallant had the diagnosis nailed, but the cardiologist overruled him. The cardiologist was portrayed as particularly unfeeling, even after the woman had passed away, saying something to the effect of “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, this sort of patient goes home and we never hear from them again. You play the statistics” At that, Gallant basically loses it, and yells at the cardiologist, saying “That doesn’t matter to the woman who just died on the table.” The cardiologist also says something to the effect about patient care being all about calculated risks. Abby, the nurse, pipes up and says, “I thought it was about patient care.”

This scene was so loaded with issues, it’s incredible. Yeah, ER can get a little crazy with everything going wrong at once, but man, it’s definitely making me wonder about what my life will be in a couple years. If I am to be respectful and obedient of the authority above me, yet I feel that the authority is not treating a patient as they deserve to be treated, as a human being made in the image of God, what am I to do? How do I live out a life that shows my respect, honor, and love for an image-bearer if I am told to either ignore certain symptoms, or “use” a person as practice for some procedure, even if it’s not medically indicated?

Reese and I had a couple guys over for dinner tonight, and I must say that I really enjoy having people over. I’m not the biggest into big dinner parties, but having a couple people over, eating, hanging out, talking, for about an hour – I think it goes a long way in just getting to know someone. One of the guys is Muslim, and was just saying how Ramadan starts tomorrow. That is an interesting holiday.
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We had a battle of the sexes Trivial Pursuit game tonight, and us guys lost, 6 to 5, because we couldn’t roll the right number to get the last piece of the pie. We danced around it for at least 10 rolls of the dice.

I’m taking this pass/fail elective called Philosophical Bioethics that has turned out to be less bioethics than I thought, and really a survey of western philosophy from Aristotle to the present-day, an hour a week, for about 12 weeks. I’m learning a lot of random stuff, and the discussions are challenging. This past week, for some reason, we were booted out of our classroom, but we stood and sat around talking about whether or not reason/rationality can exist as a thing without motivation/purpose, i.e. can you be considered a reasonable person if you’re not trying to make some sort of decision to some end? Or put another way, can rationality exist without a goal?

Just thoughts.