Avraham

Doctors and nurses work very hard, and often many hours of overtime to utmost exhaustion. Lack of adequate sleep can sometimes distort their mindset in making adequate medical decisions for their patients. Doctors are blessed with a very special mission to aid in healing. Patients and their families look up to you with tears and fear of, God forbid, losing their loved ones. It is your obligation to do everything in your power to save lives. Although science has brought us such great advancements in medicine, it is not always the only answer. Faith, prayer, hope, and love, together with compassion and the will to live, have proven over and over again that great miracles do happen. While many doctors live the life of "the rich and famous," many patients have given up all their life savings and then some for a chance to live. The support of family, friends, and their spiritual counselor is just as important as scientific medical treatment. The key to better medical care is to communicate with family members with gentle conversation, as oftentimes the patient cannot advocate for her/himself. At the end of the day, you want to leave your patient happy, and celebrate your success for reviving a patient who is doing well. Doctors are human too, and they deserve to be blessed daily for saving lives. Yet, they are constantly juggling their personal lives with their helpless patients who are in dire need of cure. They are often also caught in a dilemma, having to follow textbook protocols versus using their own experiential judgment as to who should live and who should die. That should ultimately be the decision of our creator. A living will should be respected, as oftentimes they are challenged. Patients come from different backgrounds and they practice different beliefs. In the Jewish religion, we may never terminate life. And once a patient is on life support, he must stay on it until he can get off it or until our heavenly Father takes him or her. Terminating one's life is considered murder. Doctors can be spiritually or scientifically oriented, but the choice to sustain life is a must. Believers in God perform much better. In medical school, you learn about life and death, but no one knows the secret of life and death. God is life, and without his spirit and soul, all living things cannot live. Take a day off, review your line of work, and perhaps you could identify yourself with your patients and their religious beliefs. You don't own a person's life. Life belongs to the Almighty, the one who created life. Many people in hospitals are hungry, and very often admitting doctors forget to give orders to dietary, so patients suffer from hunger. Part of the healing process is healthy nutrition. For many years, you were eager to terminate Avraham's life against his religious beliefs. Despite all the difficult years, Avraham was determined to praise God daily for the gift of life, work, and study; telling stories and cracking jokes, communicating with people, traveling, singing, playing music, enjoying his children and grandchildren, and always making people laugh or smile. His doctors and friends were surprised to see how happy and friendly he was. He had an uplifting spirit, even when he was going under the knife. He wanted to live even with pain, because he strongly believed that his pain in this world is a process to purify his spirit and soul, and he wanted to return to our heavenly Father completely clean of sin. Can you respect his beliefs, or do you feel that a sick person does not have the right to live and deserves the death penalty from mortals? I ask you to think it over and consider changing your heart.