Gods with stethoscopes

So I’m walking into a hospital recently when an interesting sign catches my eye: “Designated smoking area”. Nothing out of the ordinary there; I see signs like these everywhere.

But of course this is a hospital, a place in which there are rooms filled with people breathing through holes in their necks because their lungs have shrunk to the size of chicken gizzards. Yet this hospital’s management deemed it absolutely necessary to purchase five long benches (with seating room for about 50 human chimneys) and a plaque declaring the area a “Melt your lungs here” zone. Still, people are entitled to do whatever the hell they want, I guess. Bill of Rights and all that. One might even argue that this is good business from the hospital management’s point of view.

However, what fascinated me with this whole situation was the composition of the group of human exhaust pipes congregated on the benches for the purpose of puffing away. I can hardly be called naive, but for some inexplicable reason I was expecting to see visitors to the hospital smoking out there. Or a security guard or two. Or the guy from the cleaning services. Or a Mail & Guardian blogger. Somehow, I think I would have walked on by without as much as a glance. Clearly, I’m a silly delusional little man. No, the group was made up of three categories of individuals:

1. Patients.
2. Nurses.
3. Doctors. In surgical theatre garb and stethoscopes around their necks.

That’s right; doctors sat there in their pretty aprons inhaling tobacco smoke with medical equipment designed to test for lung-function efficacy around their necks.

Regular readers of this blog know the drill by now. When I observe sights such as this, it can only mean one thing for the spear chugger. Good times. I enjoy nothing more than to get a good chuckle out of paradoxical situations. This little situation was a cocktail of all my favourite things at the moment; a splash of delusional thinking and a hint of self-righteousness (from my end, of course). As I approached the group of lung smelters, I cleared my throat loudly and then stared at them with exaggerated shock in my eyes. One big-boned nurse stared back at me defiantly, but none of the others could look me in the eye. And then I giggled myself silly after I passed.

This is normally the point when I get silly and start making stupid jokes. You know, wondering out loud if such a conversation ever took place during lung surgery:

God with stethoscope I: Fellow God, please hand me the scalpel.
God with stethoscope II: Hold that thought, I’m just stepping outside for a quick smoke break.

If you think such a conversation never took place, you are suffering from extreme levels of gullibility. You are probably one of those people who lie on an operating table with a smile on his/her face, thinking: “The man knows what he is doing. He is, after all, wearing a pretty powder-blue little apron.” The same man cuts out chunks of cancer-riddled lungs from patients and takes smoke breaks in-between. But I will resist the silly jokes.

I have a few medical doctor friends. Highly intelligent chaps — well, sort of. They smoke and drink neat whisky, of course, like the rest of us. And they suffer from an extreme case of the God complex — my new favourite thing. The God complex manifests itself in individuals who think so highly of themselves they could as well be gods. These manifestations include the delusional belief that the rules do not apply to them.

When it comes to this whole God-complex business, I like to pick on doctors because of a movie I first watched in the early 1990s, entitled Malice, starring Alec Baldwin and Nicole Kidman. Not to give away the plot of a 14-year-old movie or anything (just in case), but it revolves around a malpractice suit against a surgeon (the Baldwin character) who unnecessarily rips out a patient’s ovaries. The patient’s attorney then puts it to the surgeon in question that he might be suffering from a case of the God complex and this is part of his response:

“So I ask you; when someone goes into that chapel and they fall on their knees and they pray to God that their wife doesn’t miscarry or that their daughter doesn’t bleed to death or that their mother doesn’t suffer acute neural trauma from post-operative shock, who do you think they’re praying to?

Now, go ahead and read your Bible, Dennis, and you go to your church, and, with any luck, you might win the annual raffle, but if you’re looking for God, he was in operating room number two on November 17, and he doesn’t like to be second-guessed.

You ask me if I have a God complex. Let me tell you something: I am God!”

Pretty chilling monologue, I know. I have watched this movie dozens of times subsequently and I get goose bumps each time I get to this part. Especially since I have discovered that, deep down in places most doctors don’t talk about in casual conversation, many of them suffer from varying degrees of the God complex. I guess I would too if I could sow back a man’s pee-pee after his wife had chopped it off. That’s a miracle.

The most common human delusion is the one that makes us all recognise the weaknesses and folly of others and be blind to our own. Doctors might have a walking-on-water thing going over there what with their ovary-ripping ways, puffing away and whatnot. But I have my own. And so do you. We all believe that bad things happen to other people, not to us because we’re special.

After all, you and I have been consuming enough whisky to knock out a baby whale and then getting behind the steering wheel of a car for ages and nothing has happened to us so far, has it? HIV/Aids? That happens only to other people — bring on those multiple partners. If you’re an average South African, then chances are you’ve engaged in one of our favourite pastimes recently. I’m taking about hurtling down one of our freeways at 160km/h, without your seat belt on and a minor passenger in the back seat — also unbuckled, of course.

You are, after all, God’s special project and accidents happen only to other people — people who do not know what they are doing. And because you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’re still alive, which can only mean that you are absolutely right — accidents truly do only happen to other people. You might even be having a good chuckle at my expense.

So ask yourself this: Deep down in places you don’t talk about at dinner parties or BEE dos, you believe you’re special, don’t you? You have a little God-complex thing you have going there, don’t you?

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