Reason: A prayer

I vow today, never to accept any fact, opinion or thought without reason. Never to believe without questioning. Never to understand without asking why. I vow to always be true to reason. Always to give a thought, and figure it out myself, why this must be so. To adopt a more scientific approach to life and all its dealings. And I know that this in itself will be my big contribution to society. By not being another unthinking face in the crowd. Adopting the majority vote. Not believing or even imagining that there can be another way! A solution out of the ordinary. I will escape from all that is mundane, and strive to be extraordinary. To NOT fit in. To not mould myself into the existing forms, but find a new, individual one, that suits me. I will not be sorry for my strikingly different thoughts. I will stand by myself, even if no one else will. I will be who I am, and to do this I will accept myself, for myself.

dignity in death

Working in the ICU since a month now, and because where I work is a tertiary care center and we have a lot of referrals from other centers throughout the country and even outside. So we see a lot of patients in a terminally ill condition whose every bodily function is at the mercy of some machine, drug or intervention. They have a tube sticking into every orifice, every accessible vein punctured, and everything but their soul, laid bare for everyone to see, scrutinize, analyze, assess, monitor. We rack our brains and try to think of where the mystery lies, refusing to give up, or god forbid, should death and disease have their way. We refuse to accept defeat from these worthy adversaries. We refuse to believe that the medical advancements of our age are inadequate. And so on and so forth, we go on until sometimes there is no semblance of a human being, a dignified one, left. So I ask myself, have we robbed that patient of his chance of a dignified death? Would I, in my final hours, want to be laid bare like that? Would I want death to be a struggle till the end? Would I rather not pass on from life to death in a much more peaceful manner? Can we not draw a line where we should stop fighting? Its not about giving up. Its about accepting a natural force, which, try as we might, is STILL beyond our control.