I’ve heard the drill many times before. “Don’t take pain killers for your headache. Stop thinking too much.” “Don’t take sleeping pills. Just listen to music or count sheep.” Among my friends, the general attitude towards medicine is–not to deal with medicine. This is why I often feel it strange that many Asian parents here want their children to take MCAT and go to Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. We don’t even trust medicine enough to take the pills and we will not go to see a doctor unless we absolutely have to. Doctors are like ghosts, who are to be avoided at all time. However medical doctor is a stable and reputable profession. Their children should strive to be a doctor even if they themselves want to have nothing to do with doctors.
For the past two days I had headache and insomnia. Probably the two are not related, but they happened at the same time, which is a sufficient reason for me to tie them together. One probably causes another, or they may have some unknown connection with each other. Some time ago during a rain storm, I heard a loud bang and our electricity was out at the same time. So I immediately thought some explosions damaged the electric wire system not far away. Then I thought these two things might not be related with each other. They just happened at the same time. Should I drive around the neighborhood to see where the exploded wire was? I thought but I was too lazy to take on such a task. Even if the headache is not related with my insomnia, I feel that both are happening in my head. At the usual bed time, I don’t feel my brain is ready for bed. My limbs and my back were showing faint sign of fatigue, but my brain doesn’t have any indication of sleepiness. Now I rarely had headache, except when the monthly visitor is screaming loudly; I rarely had insomnia before, except when I talked too excitedly before bed time, watched a movie and missed the bed time by two hours, or read a book that I couldn’t put down. None of these things have happened and I still ended up with headache and insomnia for two days straight. I got up and took NyQuil PM last night. I didn’t have a cold or flu, but I knew it can help my sleep and I had no other sleep aid.
I heard the similar stories again and again. Somebody who’s diagnosed with colon cancer or pancreatic cancer or lung cancer or even breast cancer, but it’s late stage and there’s no cure. The patient had felt unwell for a number of years, but he or she just didn’t feel like going to a doctor. I actually heard about a woman who’s diagnosed with breast cancer for only three months before succumbing. She must have procrastinated the unpleasant diagnose for years. From the point of the unwillingness to see a doctor, it is natural to climb to the next point of denying one has an ailment. There’s no better way of denying one’s ill than delaying the unpleasant news. Is it possible to underestimate our power of self deceiving?
Haoyan Do 