Something happens the last three months of the year. Every year. It's like clockwork....our lives go haywire. Instead of happiness the holidays bring pain and suffering, malevolence and discontent, and oh ya.....plain old anger. It's a frustrating time to be a physician.
The old people die.
Every year during the holidays. In droves. Inexplicably. Out of nowhere. One or two a week. Sometimes after long periods of suffering. Sometimes, all of the sudden, to every one's surprise. In greater numbers then in all the other months of the year.
The middle aged and chronically ill get depressed.
Highly functioning people become psychotic. As if something threw them over the edge or under the bus. Mental status change is the complaint of the day until it is dethroned by inexplicable pain. All over the body. Immune to the foraging fingers of cat scans and mri's. Resistant to even the most obscure blood tests. Antidepressants are dispensed like life saving oxygen.
The young get mad.
Mad that they feel unease. Mad at our busy schedules. Mad that illness is a resistant and often obnoxious foe that doesn't always bend to the will of the hapless physician. So they yell, and scream, and threaten.....as turkeys bake, carollers sing, and snow carpets the land.
And we....the downtrodden and tired. Beleaguered and feeling abused. Bundle up against the cold ice ridden world. And hunker down.
For whatever comes next.
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