Life's pace
di Ariel Bunawski

“The worst things you’ll never forget”, someone said to me in my early years; and the worst jobs too, I can say, now. So I’ll never forget those years when I worked as a dietician.
“Lately I’ve been eating lots of pork”, the old pot-bellied man said to me in a plaintive voice, “and I pour salt on it, too, you know, it could be the reason why...” - he was worried about his health, everyone could notice. And he had good reason to be, even a first-year medicinal student could guess it in a while. To my surprise I was worried and I felt uncomfortable, in that room that was my examination room, I was worried as much as my patient. And even if I had never been a dietician before, I wasn’t a greenhorn: five years at University, then my PhD and a four years’ specialization just before leaving as a volounteer physician in the Burma war campaign; I knew enough about human life and its weaknesses. Nevertheless, it was the first time I felt really uneasy.
What actually scared me, I confess, was my absolute unconcern about my patient’s conditions, that disgusting mixture of food and fear, his mournful acid voice: I wished I had the resoluteness to say to him ‘just die, Dear One, and hurry up! Nothing against you, you know, that’s Life!”. Looking into his face’s wrinkles I thought of Mrs. Lucera’s ‘troubled breathing’, she smokes so much, you know, Doctor, and she knows that you, just you, you have something that could heal her disease and allow her to keep on smoking like a chimney ... and of Mr. and Mrs. Joyce’s vomited lobster ... of some other invalid’s sweet food that he craved and needed...
Definitely, they all lacked reasons to die: good reasons, I say. A bullet, for instance, or the sudden Vietcong assault in the jungle, your Love’s betrayal or bills overdue, your favourite basketball team sixth loss or a Democratic as President. Mere pretexts! They died of Vice! ... all I could do was to help them.