At the Movies

TV is usually something as a student you would want to avoid. You sometimes go thinking "I'm not going to waste so much time watching TV, I'm only taking a couple of minutes to look at the TV guide and see what's on anyway." And of course you go crazy over something in the guide and end up watching TV instead of studying. Hardly does watching TV end up with you digging through your second year books, and in search for what? Your Medical Biochemistry book!

It was that movie "Extraordinary measures" which was all about a line we've read in the Carbohydrates Metabolism chapter without much attention. Pompe's Disease. (To refresh our memories here, that's a glycogen storage disorder. A genetic defect in the glycogen metabolism, an absent alpha 1,4 Glucosidase enzyme that is needed to degrade glycogen into glucose. The result is accumulation of the excess glycogen in different body organs leading to organomegaly, in addition to accumulation in the cardiac and respiratory muscles leading to cardiorespiratory failure and thus death). Based on the true story of a father who had two children with the fatal disease that had no treatment. But did he give up? He found the scientist whose research on synthesizing the enzyme are most advanced and together they raised money to found a biotechnology company, found investors to fund the project and went through all the drama till the drug came to life! The treatment worked, he saved his children's life and brought to existence a treatment to a fatal disease that had no available treatment before.

A true story, I said.

I tried to talk about scientific research. About preparing students with open minded creative mentalities who wouldn't take "There is no available treatment" for an answer. About waking up to see Medicine as a science, a  very soft mold that the world is still shaping and not just a school subject that you study to pass ill prepared exams that can't evaluate you. About funding. About research facilities. I was about to talk about all that when I thought how infinitely ridiculous it would be. Despite studying at the university hospital everyday (the supposed to be mother-ship of scientific research) and staring reality in the face, we dream away. We start criticizing the 50th floor of the tower while the 49 floors below it don't exist in the first place! Reality says that we can't afford providing the already available treatments for the patients who need them before we would consider funding for creating ones that don't exist. That our teachers can't teach us what's already well known to science so that they would be able to teach us creative thinking. The fact that patients learn how to turn their disease into a profession through which they make money. How stupid it is to even begin to think of research while you have a hospital with cats and cockroaches freely rooming all around the wards and the patients' beds.What facilities can you dream of finding in a place which has no facilities for placing the students during 9 am tutorials except in the wards with the patients who find it inevitable to leave the ward (if their condition allows it) until the students leave.

It's even more ridiculous to talk about all of that frustration. What's the point? Fixing the decaying distorted ghost of a health care system we have would require fixing the economic, social and political system of the country. A decent health care system can only be the final outcome of a decent community planning system on every possible aspect. And the fact that it is pointless to discuss it before the previously mentioned reforms take place only adds up to the unbelievable frustration.

The only thing left for you to do in the middle of that pointlessness is to figure out which place out of the very limited options of places do you want to stand. The pointlessness and frustration don't seem to strike everybody that hard anyway. There are those walking around completely satisfied thinking they are unbelievably important people for getting to be part of the leadership of that ghost of a system. As long as they're able to swim on the surface of the swamp then who the hell cares about its bottom? And there are those  who are trying to build the 50th floor in the air although they know it all falls at the end but contented with the good however limited they do through their attempts. There are those working on finding an exit for themselves and those working on finding an exit for everybody else except themselves. There are those at the bottom of the swamp like the helpless patients or the care givers who have completely given up on everything and surrendered. And then there are those who have decided to go through the fight for building the base, for reforming the head of this country's system so that the builders of the 50th floor won't fall as they always eventually do. All you have to do is just decide.