why should I care?

All my life, I have looked after myself first and now that I am in a pickle, I moan that others do not care about the injustice inflicted upon me. Now that I have known what it feels like to be treated as an undesirable and expendable element in a community, I understand what it must be like (not fully, but atleast partly) to be helpless and poor and weak and illiterate and trod over. I cannot quench the self righteous rage that fills up every now and again, I cannot believe that the whole world is not saying 'Let us make Unni's life better, he deserves a better chance'. Then, in a brief moment of clarity, I realise that till now I was one of the 'have it, care not' bunch. Now that my life is difficult, I have started making noise about the unfair system. Maybe I should list the people I never cared about who I feel a kinship to now:

The poor - in general
The beggars
The illiterate
The mentally ill
The unemployed
The homeless
The orphans
The handicapped

the list goes on
Not that I was ever cruel or disrespectful to anyone, but I NEVER ever cared!

It has taken a significant extent of personal insecurity for me to even 'waste' time thinking about other people. And yet, I am still to do anything selfless to help these 'other people'.

Yes, I went into medicine to help others, but now I realise that the small print in my 'mental contract' said:
'I want to be given the knowledge and skills to make my life comfortable and make me happy and then to help others'

I also realised after I started my research that I am more anxious about my project than I ever was about any of my patients. I have never been rude or unprofessional or indifferent to patients, but the scale of anxiety is just not the same. I wonder whether it is just me who is this selfish!
The way I worry about my blood samples and my RNA and my data and my project grant - makes me sick that I never worried about the people I looked after to this extent, even though at the time, if someone were to ask me whether I cared about my patients' well being, my answer would have been a resounding yes.

I think the whole future of the British health system is in danger. I maybe one of the casualties of the current battle - but like in any war, the damage to an individual casualty pales in comparison to the damage to the system. Somewhere along the line, doctors have forgotten what they are fighting for, forgotten the face of their fathers, as Roland would have said (apologies to S King). The profession's shift in focus from 'high quality training and service' to just 'service and opportunistic training of variable quality' will turn out to be a death blow, when people look back at the current situation in 10 years time, wondering what went wrong. And through all this, the senior medical colleagues are silent - they have the attitude that I had about the homeless and the less fortunate - ' why should I care? '

This is nothing new. About 300 years ago, Edmund Burke said:
'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'

More relevant to my profession, the great William Osler, who was not just a physician, but a great thinker summed things up very eloquently:
'By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy - indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction'

The three reasons he gives for apathy sound uncannily prophetic, as if he has visited us in 2007 and seen the mess we are in as a profession.

I am sad, very sad, not just about my future, but about the crumbling system. It is akin to the sadness you feel when you see cobwebs and cracks in your childhood home, the same sadness when you see someone dear grow old and weak and confused.

And then I realise, all around me the world is rushing forward to meet tomorrow, with an attitude no different to mine when it concerns someone else:

why should I care?