And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon

Have you noticed physicians don’t dwell on why you came to their office?  They only ask about your old habits to put together a treatment plan to treat you, not to remind you.  They’ll still check if you’ve gone back to old habits, but their not going to nag you.  They know all too well if they ask you why? you’re just going to blurt out some nursery rhyme answer.  Patient heal thyself is still the medicine of choice.  Can you imagine if your doctor hired your grandmother as the office receptionist?  Every time you checked in you’d hear, “you know,  if you hadn’t eaten all that fried food over the years, you wouldn’t have diabetes.”  “I told you tanning with animal lard was bad.”  “I knew those cellphones would hurt your eyes.”  Pokes in the eyes with should’ve’s, ought to’s, used to’s, don’t change outcomes; so thank God doctors don’t use them.  The solar system would also be a much better place if people in general quit asking why.

One morning my mother said to me, “if you and your high school friends hadn’t wrecked my station wagon on the Charboneau Road last night I wouldn’t be missing my hair appointment today.”  I rejected her inference on why;  I thought her hair looked fine.  This same interchange happens in Fortune 500 companies between top executives.  I was in a corporate executive meeting once where the CEO was demanding to know why one hospital was losing money.  The Regional VP’s answer was  “that hospital used to make a lot of money years ago”.   I added, “Yeah, I used to date high school girls, but I don’t anymore.”  Eric Waller chimed in,  “if I had caught that two point conversion, we would’ve won the State Championship.”  Britt Reynolds reflected, “if I hadn’t met my wife at that Louisville Cracker Barrel, she wouldn’t have divorced me that night.”  Asking why always gets you an answer, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

One of many reasons I’ve survived cancer all of these years is I’ve never asked “why did this happen to me?”  Why? My first cancer was Hodgkin’s Disease which to this day has no real cause.  There’s no one to blame for it but myself and my crummy genes.  I initially thought about blaming my parents for conceiving me, but if given a second chance they’d sent me back quicker then an Amazon return.  So not if, but when you have a health issue, do yourself a big favor and think “what steps do I need to take to recover” instead of seeking blame and asking “why did this happen to me?”  Why are there craters on the moon?  Because God made it out of Swiss cheese, right?