We’re Invulnerable, Right?
When you study diseases and cancers and other terrible things all day long, you start to formulate the most invalid of hypotheses: this is pathology that affects other people. I will not get cancer. I will not have a risk of dying. I will go on my merry way, helping my patients. I will remain 24.
We need to know these diseases and their symptoms and complications to help our patients, never us. Maybe it’s an “us versus them” mentality, or maybe it’s just a psychological defense mechanism, but either way, I’m constantly reading about some disease and thinking to myself, “Man, that would really be awful to get that. I feel so bad for what they must have to go through.” But then a moment later, the reality hits me-and it’s frightening. I’m assuming that these awful cancers with awful prognoses and awful survival rates and awful treatments will somehow skip me. I’m just as likely to develop some of these cancers or diseases. I don’t get a “by” just because I’m going to be a doctor.
Perhaps that’s why doctors are more likely to smoke, drink in excess, or do recreational drugs than you’d expect. Less likely to get a regular checkup and physical. These aren’t diseases that affect all people. They affect other people.
Yeah, my friend Alison has always argued with me that it’s a necessary defense-mechanism of people to believe “it won’t happen to them”.
I’ve never felt that way.
But maybe that’s because I have had quite a few things happen to me. I’ve had 2 surgeries, a murder happened in a relative’s house (a tenant who was renting the house off my relative), my uncle was deployed to Iraq (at age 58), my father was in WWII, my uncle at the beach at Normandy, I’m 2nd generation born in the U.S., (I don’t feel far removed from immigrants)… These are often “us/them” situations, which is why I use them as examples.
I generally think anything could happen to me, to be honest.
So no, I don’t think that’s NECESSARILY the reason doctors might smoke (knowing very closely the possible consequences).
After all, I smoke, and I was with my grandfather, my very best friend as a child, when he died of lung cancer. I remember hearing his screams in the hospital room as they vacuumed his lungs that last week of his life. My other grandfather also died of a type of lung disease. I take little comfort in the fact that I have never been a coal minor, and both of them were. Just last night I learned a woman I know learned her cancer is back and might be matastisized (sp?). It’s in her lungs now, and apparently she’s not, and apparently has never been, a smoker.
As my father died of a heart attack, and my mother’s already had coronary bypass surgery. I’m fairly convinced that unless it really was my mother’s lack of hormone replacement therapy… I’m pretty much screwed. haha. And I keep smoking.
Smoking is an addiction and a compulsion. As are many things that are unhealthy.
And the fact that people continue to smoke even after having a diagnosis of lung/heart trouble, and people even continue to drink alcohol after developing liver disease or pancreatitis from it… shows that “it won’t happen to me” isn’t an adequate explanation for those particular things.
That’s not to say I think that it’s not true, that doctors do tend to push it out of their minds that it might happen to them. Like my friend Alison says, if you constantly DWELLED on what MIGHT happen to you, as if it WILL happen, you’d never do anything at all, for the off-hand risks of bad things happening.
Every day you get in a car & get on the road you probably quadruple your chances of dying that day, after all.
And I’m someone who thinks about that… yes, just about every time I’m driving, at least for a moment. But I continue to drive.
I hardly think I’m this rare exception of someone very aware of reality, with such unusual courage.
I think I’m just wise to the fact that some risks have to be taken, as a logical thought process of living.
And in the case of my smoking, I’m simply suffering from an addiction to it, which completely negates any logic by the very nature of the affliction.