Are We Colleagues?

Or About Being a Doctor that Cannot Save a Fly

As I am spending already two weeks stuck in a hospital - or two - coming to terms to a serious medical condition, I am confronted every other day with the gentle question on behalf of the qualified doctors: are we colleagues?

In the German-speaking realm, holding a title of doctor is considered a social achievement and adding the title to your full name is customary. Austria goes so far that overachieved academics - that may hold two doctor titles, at least - freely add all of them, the result being long combinations of Dr.Dr., sometimes dr. h.c etc too. It may look unusual for some eyes, but in my opinion it is the right recognition of long years of hard work and personal sacrifice. All those times spent stuck in the libraries from early in the morning until late in the night, perusing hundreds of pages per day, out of which you may produce maximum one sentence. All those days, and especially nights, spent writing, re-writing and deleting hundreds of words in order to create something new, insightful and completely original. Also, the days and nights spent unable to advance any single word, putting yourself and your intellectual capacity into question and even questioning your role as a public intellectual.

The priviledges of PhD

If you went at least through a five year PhD program you know very well what I am talking about. 

True is also that given the available financial and intellectual resources, having a PhD nowadays is much easier than it used to be one or two decades ago. Some of our societies are interested to invest in intellectual achievement and appreciate the undergraduate work, therefore various financial incentives - such as grants - are available for those keen to pursue an advanced career. However, as the job market is becoming highly specialized and the academic job searching dramatically competitive, it is another question that I will not address right now how easily it is to find a job in your line of research, for a long-term contract, especially if you are specialized in some obscure Middle Ages poet. As in any other domain, being flexible, open to learning new skills and using the general knowledge accumulated through years of specialized research may help survive on the market. Otherwise, you can end up like this academic, who is keeping herself updated with the latest published information in her domain of study - history - trying to publish articles and books once in a while, but getting the main sources of income from various projects by using research and linguistic skills acquired during the research. For me, as for many other people that embarked on the intellectual pathway, PhD is not the beginning or the end, it´s a natural stage of a life of constant dedication to the works of the intellect.

Not the first in my family to earn a PhD, I never took my academic achievements for granted and rather considered them with humility. The time spent in the academic world was the result of a relatively priviledged family background, that allowed me to spent time in prestigious high-education institutions, to have direct access to relevant people in my area of study as well as to noteworthy sources of information. I´m feeling guilty sometimes for not being humble enough for recognizing my priviledge and maybe also for taking way too easily my academic journey that did not require any sacrifices - financial - on my side. 

An insider job

Before and long time after moving to Germany though, I kept my PhD only for the job applications and avoided to mention in my personal or professional emails, for instance, my academic title - a detail that, as I mentioned before, is more than customary. Unknown to me is the fact that suddenly, in my health insurance, before my name, the Dr. title was added, probably the result of some hasty hour of truth while filling the famous tons of papers required efficiently by any stage of German bureaucracy. Adding the title of doctor for a document used for the interaction with mostly medical personnel is not necessarily the best remedy against the imposter syndrome.

My family dreamed on me being a doctor. Due to some early childhood medical issues and some serious time spent in hospitals, I was considering this profession as well, fascinated either by the technical details of the tools used for different stages of the process or by the thought of being able to make people healthy - at least in most of the cases; or both. But those were the childhood dreams that once entering the rebelious teenage years were shortly forgotten. At that moment in time I decided that although science, and particularly medicine, will always be of interest to me, I want to spend the rest of my life writing the chronicle of the current times, using all my might, knowledge and energy as a journalist or in the field of writing in general. This is how I´ve intensively spent the last two decades of my life - which doesn´t mean that I am that old because, in fact, I was barely 15 when my serious personal and professional decision of being a writer was taken. Among other achievements, I also earn a PhD in history, dealing with intercultural and minority relations among elites in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time of my PhD research, Central and Eastern Europe was a relevant topic of study and of political planning, but not too much nowadays. That´s all I have in terms of doctor knowledge.

The real doctors

I´ve never faced my old professional choices as in the last two weeks. Being forced to spend some time in the hospital and while keeping updated about the situation regarding the Coronavirus spread around the world, I´m in awe for the valuable work the representatives of the medical system are doing every single second. Each and everyone all over the world active in various capacity in the medical system is a hero. Many of them are working under tremendous stress, underpaid, underevaluated and exposing themselves to life-threatening risks. They work against the clock and against all institutional and human odds to save human lives.

Me, the colleague they are asking about, can barely save a fly. 

Of course it is a very simplistic perspective and I am fully aware that, at a certain point, all of us, doctors in various fields, we can do great works. Both the remedies created by the medical doctors and the poetry analysed by the doctors in literature are good for the humanity. But in time of such tremendous crisis, saving lives and putting humans in flesh and blood first is what it matters first and foremost. 

I´ve seen a couple of days ago on social media a question about the possible outcome of the current crisis, about the extent to which the crisis will change the ways in which we will interact with each other and consider each other as human beings. My bet is on more humanity and more solidarity, more understanding towards each other needs and feelings. 

After all, intellectuals - a category to whom medical and other doctors belong to - are supposed to play a role in offering role models and human inspiration. Isn´t it the right time to do so right now and make this dramatic shift?

In this mission, we are all colleagues...