A Time to Suffer, a Time to Play.

There was a young woman coming out of the doctor’s surgery in Uttoxeter today carrying a child of around 12-18 months who was lying supine in her arms. She was flanked by two paramedics and the child looked semi-conscious, so it was natural to assume there was something wrong. They were all heading for an ambulance parked at the top of the precinct. For the next five to ten minutes I had to hold in the inevitable emotional reaction because I can’t stand seeing children in trouble or suffering.

You know, if there are any laws in the universe at all, one of the foremost should be that children are not allowed to suffer. Heaven knows suffering is bad enough when you’ve grown to an age at which you can rationalise it and see its place in the scheme of things. Children don’t have that faculty and so they don’t deserve to suffer. They have to do it in a vacuum and that isn’t fair.

And then I thought, as I have before, that working in paediatrics must be a constant emotional rollercoaster. How great must be the euphoria when you cure a child, and how desperately sorrowful you must feel when you fail. And it seems ironic that paediatricians and their staff must have to keep going, on and on, learning to rationalise the suffering which they themselves must sometimes have to go through.