When the doctor is afraid of the disease

It was a morning like all the previous ones, as always with the usual eagerness of the city in the middle of displacement to comply with work obligations; however, that day would bring new experiences, situations that life is placing in your way.

I was heading to a medical center to work when I met a good friend and colleague, and took a few minutes to talk with him even though we are always out of time due to work commitments.

Doctors often end up talking about medicine for reasons that I don’t understand, but this time I noticed my friend was thoughtful, so I turned my attention to him. When I asked him how things were going, he told me about his experience in relation to his visit to the doctor for thyroid problems.

It was paradoxical because he was an endocrinologist and, to his life’s surprise, he had noticed a prominence on his neck that led him to diagnose himself with a thyroid nodule.

It is one of the diseases that we treat the most in endocrinology. He had treated hundreds of patients with this illness, and he refers to telling them that the worst scenario could be thyroid cancer. However, he immediately tried to reassure them because it’s not easy facing such a horrible word (cancer), since in general, thyroid cancer has a good prognosis.

According to his story, it was necessary to perform a biopsy, which is the usual procedure in these cases, and when the necessary time was fulfilled, the result was delivered.

-I felt a chill when reading the results, he referred.

That result showed that the possibility of thyroid cancer was real, and despite he fights against this cancer day-to-day, despite having studied it for years and knowing that its prognosis is good, he undressed his medical condition and his humanity emerged. He felt his body shudder.

The fact of being a doctor changed things a little worse because he knew everything that could happen from now on.

The scalpel had never passed through his skin, rather he used to send patients to the surgeon when he believed they needed surgery… this time the scalpel himself was stalking him.

This experience reminded him that we are fragile vessels, and at any moment we can break. He realized that due to being immersed at work, he hardly had time to find a space to go to a medical appointment himself. He was aware that in that daily life he hardly had any space to reflect on what was happening with himself and around him because when he finished his day, he had only a few hours left before falling asleep because of his fatigue.

Although it was not the worst news, that day life reminded us that we will not always have the same energy and that health is something that is often there and we are not aware of it until it diminishes or disappears.

That day, the doctor was afraid not of death itself, but of illness, which is nothing other than the loss of freedom.