Cry me a river.

I am allowed to dislike a patient. Although so much of my medical training has ingrained in me the fact that countertranference is a reality that must be overcome in order to achieve empathetically rapport, I think that's bullshit written up by some hippie freak who never had an asshole as a patient, or was too oblivious to diagnose the assholism.

Now, what is ironic to me, is that most of the cheeriest, most affable patients that I have met are oncology patients. This is perhaps due to the fact that I have met so many later on in the disease, either when they have already achieved remission, or when they are so far advanced that they seemed to be at peace with their future. For the most part, I have noticed them to be stoic, strong, with a complacency that I, myself, even envy.

But there is the other extreme. Luckily, he is the first one of this prototype I have ever encountered, but by no means the last.I liken him to a cross between Jack McFarland and Simon of American Idol. With a Frasier-like snobbery, a biting sarcasm, all atop a cloud of blazeed flamboyancy. So that you can imagine him mauling away at your self-worth, flinging your insecurities in your face, all while sipping tea with a raised small finger.

"Oh look, new residents. How tedious," says he, as my resident and I enter the room. And when I introduce myself as the sub-intern, he retorted, dismissively, "oh I figured as much." Not to be outdone, I replied that I only looked young. "Don't worry, I won't last," this he replied.

I imagine that he fancies himself more intelligent, more respectable, and above all this -- the hospital, the nurses, the house-staff. Moreover, I imagine that he feels, because of his illness, that sense of entitlement. That all the world should pity him and that he is justified in accepting this pity with scorn, sarcasm, and blatant rudeness.

I could understand this mentality. When you, being terminally ill, become so inured to condolences, so many of which are forced, dealt out of necessity, pursuant to social decorum, rather than from sincerity, when you become so weary of the helplessness of those most capable of help, when you are so depressed, anxious, even terrified of your fate, and all anyone has to offer are drugs that ravage your immune system, make you sicker than you already were, render you bald, cachectic, and weak, at the end of which you hear no happy news, but rather more "sorries" and "how terrible" accompanied by stupid mylar balloons and kitschy cards filled with inane Hallmark-sentimentality. I cannot imagine how that must be like.

But at the end of it all, you are the one that decides how to respond. Whether or not you choose to spread your embitteredness to others, because you suppose their pity to be a byproduct of social conformation. I will not say that it is wrong, because that is a personal value judgment. Rather, I will say it is unjust; it is exploitating your condition, knowing that no one dare challenge your cruelty because their own conscience cannot allow it.

I hate that he chooses to be cruel, and that I feel reservation at resenting him, because I feel this need to understand his point of view, without his being obligated to consider mine. Because he is with condition, and I am without. And that he feels, in some sordid way, that fairness can only exist between us if he is allowed to be vicious.

Perhaps in the course of his stay, we will reach an understanding. That my goal is simple -- to help and not to impose. But somehow I think his years of hard-experience have already numbed his sensibilities, and that he has already transcended the reaches of human compassion. And here left is this hard shell of a being, devoid of human emotion, cold, practically dead.