"unless you can get someone to cover your shifts,” inhuman medical profession

“Not unless you can get someone to cover your shifts,” was the answer.

No one was available to cover.

As the rest of us beheld his beloved “Gran” in death, drawing much-needed support from each other, her first grandson, a newly minted doctor of medicine — the very type whose job it is to become the most compassionate human being of all professions possible — was working as a very junior resident. By all respects he was inconsequential in the massive hierarchy of the hospital system. It wasn’t as if he was a world famous neurosurgeon about to separate conjoined twins, and whose clinical service was critical. He was just a boy whose most loved grandmother had suddenly died.

He was just a boy, stuck inside the most inhumane of humane professions, trying to take care of humanity in the most duplicitous way possible. He was just a boy at the mercy of some callous attending physician who didn’t have the conscience to allow a moment of dignity for him to grieve with the rest of his family. He was just a boy who would remember this badge of indoctrination for the rest of his life