Why I Admire My Dog

Sometimes I wish people, myself included, were more like my dog. We got Wags at the SPCA when she was a puppy. She is now 14 or 15 years old and doesn’t move very fast and can’t see or hear very well. But she is the sweetest mammal on the planet.

Sometimes she wanders away from home and we need to go find her. When we do find her, she always trots towards us with her tail wagging, like maybe she was looking for us. The one time she didn’t come right to me, I knew something was wrong even though I couldn’t see her very well in the dark woods with my flashlight. It turned out that a large flap of skin had been torn from her underside and was dangling on the ground. As I carried her back home, she didn’t protest in any way but just nuzzled her nose up under my chin.

Recently as I was letting them in for the night, our other rambunctious beagle just ran into her and knocked her flat on her side. She didn’t make any fuss but just got back up and trotted in with her tail wagging. When she tries to sniff the cat and gets hissed and swiped at, she just turns around and walks away as if nothing happened. When she doesn’t want to go outside and I make her, she doesn’t resist.

When we get home, she trots out to greet us, tail wagging (at least if she is close enough to hear us drive up which needs to be pretty close). She gracefully endures the constant unwanted attention of our other dog.

I think if there was a canine version of “the fruit of the spirit,” she would be the poster child for it. So today I am going to endeavor to be like Wags – no barking or growling at others, lots of tail-wagging, and just getting back up and continuing on if I get knocked down.

Doctors Are People Too

In case anyone wondered, physicians are actual people. We are subject to the usual foibles of humanity – pride, selfishness, impatience, anxiety, fatigue, and our own personal biases to name a few. Hopefully these tendencies are mitigated by professional standards, a desire to help people, and the pursuit of objective evidence.

There was a time in my career when I was working far too hard. I was perpetually exhausted and it wasn’t unusual for me to walk into a room to examine a child and have the mother say “Dr. Sauder, are you OK?” One night I was making hospital rounds after a long day in the office and the grandmother of one of my patients said to me, “Dr. Sauder, you look like you could use a hug.” We must have been an odd sight; an older African American woman and a younger (at the time) white doctor embracing on the pediatric ward late at night. I am sure she never realized how much that buoyed my spirits.

Doctors, being human, make mistakes. Interestingly, I have found that people have often been more forgiving of my actual mistakes than my perceived mistakes. And as with most things in life, circumstances are often not exactly as they appear on the surface. There have been times that I have heard things in public about physicians or events that I knew weren’t true but I could not correct them because I would have needed to compromise a patient’s confidentiality to do so.

Clearly the days of regarding a doctor’s word as gospel truth are long gone, as they should be. We have years of training and experience in our chosen field and are dedicated to doing the best we can for our patients. But we are also human. And it is important for us and for our patients to remember that.