Still

Scarred

Maui · Hawai’i · USA

...It’s only when you regard others in the spirit of humanity and curiosity that you can come to understand at least a modicum of all they’ve had to endure to earn the deeply-etched lines that adorn their faces, the calluses that roughen their hands, or the scars that crisscross their abdomens. You come to cultivate some measure of appreciation for the imperfect being before you, however deplorable or unfair the circumstances or decisions that shaped them may have been. You come to appreciate the strange beauty in their unique story of struggle and survival, no matter how aesthetically displeasing things may look on or from the outside. And you also come to learn that what you see here and now is evanescent, a transient snapshot in an ever changing continuum of development and eventual deterioration that we are all slave to.

And maybe, just maybe, if nothing else that single thread of commonality is enough to reweave the problem lists of disjointed diagnoses, chief complaints, and organ systems that were presented to you rapid-fire by the first responder, the ER doc, the ICU nurse, or the utilization reviewer back into the soulful and whole entities they always had been, are, and always will be--before the assembly-line healthcare system and the electronic medical record somehow bastardized their humanity and bamboozled you into believing that the parts added back together were worth more than the sum...