Masked

When telephone hoax or telemarketing are everywhere, any incoming call without the caller's number displayed can be enough to push us over the edge. It's no different even if the caller is a doctor (who won't sell low credit card interest or mortgage plan).

That's a big problem when a hospital masks all the outgoing telephone call numbers. Hospitals aren't supposed to appear like a terrorist wearing mask, of course, unless that hospital turns out to behave like Osama bin Laden - and mine has. In the broad sense, this means all the telephone calls from my hospital are masked without call number displayed. Believe me, that is annoying when a patient didn't answer the phone call from a doctor who needed to talk about a dangerously high potassium blood level.

Slushy nonsense? Not a bit of it! Masking the outgoing phone call numbers is said to protect the privacy of the hospital. Privacy. It's a big word that seems grand. I could hardly believe it, yet I knew I had to.

If you'll let me, I'd like to mask myself and say it secretly, the brain behind that concept of masked outgoing call number is clogged and sclerotic with hierarchy.  

Flight

I was reading Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide when one of our medical students asked me for help. That student has to take another half year remedial class before graduation. Dare to call remedial school term a "final sentence," and you're likely to hear exasperated moans and groans from the students.

I couldn't help thinking of Lehrer's near-death experience as a pilot. On a rainy fall day, beneath clouds so grey that dawn bled into evening, he was at seven thousand feet and his plane's left engine was on fire. He didn't know what to do.

He knew he could increase the speed but wasn't sure if the only remaining engine can handle the climb. What's the alternative? Well, he could steepen the descent and let the downward momentum steer the plane. Or so he thought. But, alas, he might not be able to regain control and fall into what pilots call a graveyard spiral. His knees buckled and his shoulders slumped, like a marionette's with the string released.

About thirty seconds passed, and Lehrer was still thinking. The clock was ticking. It was such a life-or-death scene that you would think you could not go back. But then it wasn't. It was only a flight stimulator that pushed Lehrer's vein awash with adrenaline.

We may not always know exactly what a pilot feels, why a pilot does what he does, or feels what he feels. But that's exactly what a medical student would face in a disastrous final examination. Gosh, it's about either safe landing or crashing. Everything goes faster and faster until the mayhem takes over, pushing a desperate student into a horrifying nosedive, or what we call a downward spiral.

Yes, yes, that's terrifying.

And then, if you think more about it, that's merely a flight stimulator exercise. That won't kill a single passenger sitting in the cabin, and not even the pilot.