My gratitude

I have written about my gratitude to the doctors & nurses at the Floating Hospital, and also my gratitude to the dentist & endodontist who rescued my tooth a few weeks ago, and also the neurologist who diagnosed and treated my facial pain.

I mentioned this gratitude to a number of people, and generally got this reaction: well, that's what those folks do. They are doing what they do for a living.

So I was intrigued by an article in the NY Times today by Dan Bilefsky about how Roumanians must bribe their doctors & nurses in order to receive standard medical care. The main case featured concerns a couple, Alina and Ionut Lungu, who failed to provide a large enough bribe to her obstetrician. Feeling snubbed, he didn't bother to come to the hospital when she went into labor. There were complications, and Alina's son was born with brain damage. Nothing can be done.

Bilefsky reports that the entire medical system is corrupted, and doctors, nurses, & orderlies all respond only to bribes in order to provide their services. He traces this back to Soviet-era practices that "the medical profession here had been denigrated under Communist leaders who made workers in factories the country's heroes."

Our social system is a human creation. All human creations are temporary and fragile, depending on incalculable relationships between people, memory and practices. Reflections like this lead one, like Edmund Burke, to seek a "conservative" approach to social planning. But our society is hurtling forward, relationships are changing and multiplexing. It may be that in ten years we don't "go to the doctor" but meet a medical provider in Second Life.

How will we preserve the integrity of relationships that we take for granted here? The integrity that made it possible for us to have three little girls, premature & tiny, and know that they would recieve wonderful, loving, expert, life-preserving care?