Monday, April 21, 2008 Echaves: Common sense By Lelani P. Echaves Thinking Aloud
NO, I didn’t get to view the Black Suede Scandal in Cebu on the Internet.
Didn’t request for the images to be forwarded to my mobile phone either.
And I’m grateful none of my friends passed them on to me. By the basic tenets of decency and respect, and common sense, some things just don’t get committed.
I did get a glimpse of the video footage in the ABS-CBN news the night before the story got bannered in the local dailies. I couldn’t make out the images, but I was struck by the sounds of people heckling, laughing and jeering. Until the television reporter’s clincher, I thought it was a story of some alleged witchcraft and exorcism in some backwoods of this province.
Despite the visual medium that television is, ABS-CBN did not even mention which part of the body the operation was conducted on. The reporter merely said an “unusual” operation had been conducted. Again, by the tenets of basic decency and respect, and common sense, some things just don’t get committed.
So, where were had basic decency and respect, and common sense disappeared to during Jan-Jan’s operation at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC)? Mobile phones were allowed even in the operating room, it’s reported. Don’t doctors and nurses even scrub themselves to minimize infection? But mobile phones got in?
Of course, hospitals are now in a frenzy of knee-jerk reactions. Guidelines re conduct in the operating room are being reviewed, and voila, mobile phones are no longer allowed inside the OR. Funny, they had to wait for a Jan-Jan incident to stress what common sense alone would’ve dictated—some things just don’t belong in an operating room.
The operation was reportedly uploaded to YouTube by a nursing student who, we’re told, has been expelled from his/her nursing school. Such behavior only strengthens the need for stricter screening of applicants into the nursing colleges. Not everyone who worships the almighty dollar abroad should enter the kingdom of nursing.
Nursing and medicine should be for those with a passion to help people, to ease their suffering, to reinforce their will to live, to make them forget their pains, even if briefly, and for terminal cases, to let them welcome the life beyond this life. Death is, after all, just a physical separation.
At the pinning ceremony of Benedicto College in Mandaue City this month, I invited the nursing graduates to remember why they took up nursing. To improve one’s quality of life is acceptable. To help the family financially; that, too. But money alone is not enough. Needs can be met; greed, never.
Money-motivated nurses and doctors will not stay long in their profession.
Sooner than later, the pain and suffering will wear them, defeat them. They might as well earn big bucks abroad, but there’s the retrogression. Their passion gone, they’ll just cruise along until the overseas job beckons. Who cares if patients, asleep or awake, are suffering? Who cares if their rights are violated?
What if such people are in the operating rooms? Run for your lives!
