Gayl - the doctor

What type of a doctor is Gayl? Compassionate. Caring. Intelligent. Loving. Serving. One who placed others before herserlf. A doctor who willingly took into her heart the hopes, fears, and terror of people facing horrible situations and helped them through it, no matter the cost to her. She never left a patient's side while there was something she could do for them or while they needed comforting and compassion as they faced illness and death. She would stay there, with the friendless, and listen to them as they met eternity. Every person was important to her. She was the opposite of narcissistic, she placed others before self. Always. She was modest about her skill, self-efacing about her actions, and humble in her accomplishments.

Why is this important? Because so few doctors are this way. Very few are humble. Fewer yet are willing to sit with their patient as they meet eternity. Talk to them and you will find out why; the fact is that the patient's death damages their own self-image as god-like dispensers of healing, their narcissistic views of themselves as perfect or nearly-so. To see the failure, no matter the need of the patient or the family, is more than the average doctor can bear. Their egos are too dependent upon their inflated view of their importance and infallability. So, doctors do not help patients, they treat them and leave them to die alone. They break the trust we place in them, their behavior is narcissistic and self-interested whereas a good doctor is neither of these things. Read the references below, they will give you insight into the psyche of a doctor; most are inflated, self-important, egotistic, narcissistic souls who deny their own failures and shortcomings and blame others, including (ESPECIALLY including) their patients for the patients' problems and inability to get better. How unlike Gayl they are.

Gayl's willingness to stay and help, her compassion, her love for every person she treated, sets her apart from her peers. Some may be as bright and skillful. Some may be as knowledgeable. But none are more compassionate. This is why Gayl, as a doctor, stands out from other doctors in such stark relief. Where they avoid facing their medical failures, their humanity, their inability to cure all, by running and hiding from the patient in need; Gayl stayed with the patient precisely because they were in need. In need of more than medicine but rather in need of a human touch and compassion and empathy as they fought their fight. How can I get others to see what I saw? She would stay with anyone, anytime. I saw her, more than once, stay with a lonely dying person as they passed away just so that they would not be alone. And then go home heartbroken and shattered by the emotional cost she bore by being at the bedside. But, she is too good of a doctor to turn from someone in need, so she stayed. Not because the person in the bed was famous or rich. Usually they were poor, indigent, worn down by a cruel world and without hope. She gave them hope. She saved souls in those last moments. She gave compassion and love to people she did not know. And then came home and cried for them. How many doctors do that, today? How many doctors fight for their patient's lives and dignity, today. Gayl did. She showed us all what a Christian doctor is like. I honor her for it and love her all the more.

The world is a poorer place and I am a poorer man because she is not with us.


REFERENCES
Jeffrey Adams and Eric Williams, eds., Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature From Romanticism to Post-Modernism (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), p. 18.

M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil (New York, Touchstone, 1998).

See Chapers 2 and 3 of Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism, An Introduction,” in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), p. 74.

Alexander Lowen, M.D., Narcissism: Denial Of the True Self (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 6.

See chapter 14 in Theodore Millon, with Roger D. Davis, Disorders of Personality: DSM-IV and Beyond, 2nd edition (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996), pp, 505-539.

W. John Livesley, ed., The DSM-IV Personality Disorders (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).

Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 65-68, 77.

Peck, People of the Lie, pp. 66, 226.

Susan Bridle, “The Seeds of the Self: An Interview With Otto Kernberg,” What is Enlightenment?, no. 17 (Spring-Summer, 2000), http://www.wie.org/j17/kern.asp

Benedict Carey, “For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be ‘Evil’,” New York Times, February 8, 2005.

Of the two, Aristotle placed greater importance on malice, insisting that one can be forgiven for a wrong action because we all make mistakes, but never for a wrong desire.

See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1966).

Lowen, Narcissism, p. 13.

Barbara Ann Shapiro, Literature and the Relational Self (New York & London: New York University Press, 1994), p. 11.

Adams and Williams, “Introduction,” pp. 5, 16.

Bridle, “The Seeds of the Self: An Interview With Otto Kernberg.”

Adams and Williams, “Introduction,” pp. 6-7.

Lowen, Narcissism, pp. 6-7.

Freud, “On Narcissism, An Introduction,” pp. 73-75, 93, 87-88.

Lowen, Narcissism, p. 12.

See George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (Washington: Brassey’s, 2000).

“Beneath Narcissism Lie Fear and Self-Loathing,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2002, p. E9.

John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), p. 249.

Freud, “On Narcissism,” p. 89.

Lowen, Narcissism, pp. xi, 13-14.

Clute and Grant, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, p. 249

Bridle, “The Seeds of the Self: An Interview with Otto Kernberg.”

Freud, “On Narcissism,” pp. 99, 98, 85.

Bridle, “The Seeds of the Self: An Interview with Otto Kernberg.”

Adam Gopnik, “Death of a Fish,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2005, p. 46.

Fromm, Heart of Man, p. 36.

See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology (1975), and Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.

Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 10.

“Confessions of BTK,” Dateline NBC, August 12, 2005.

Roxana Hegeman, “BTK Defendant Pleads Guilty,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 2005, p. A5.

Carl Jung, “Introduction to the Problems of Alchemy,” in Jung On Evil, selected and introduced by Murray Stein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1995), p. 34.

Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1995), pp. 4-5.

“Projection” is a defense mechanism “by which characteristics or desires that are unacceptable to a person’s ego are externalized or projected onto someone else.” Mike Cardwell, Shaum’s A-Z Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), pp. 192, 213.


Lowen, Narcissism, p. 15.

Hicks, 50 Signs of Mental Illness, p. 128.

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), pp. 243-244.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The End of Time,” in Tiemo Rainer Peters and Claus Urban (eds.), The End of Time?: The Provocation of Talking About God (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), p. 23.