“She had a high parasitemia,” Farmer remembered. “Bad malaria. She went into a coma…. she needed a transfusion….. the doctor told her sister to go to Port-au-Price to get her some blood, but he said that she will need money. I had no money. I ran around the hospital and rounded up fifteen dollars. I gave her the money and she went away, but she came back and she didn’t have enough for both a tap-tap and the blood.” … The women have five kids. The sister said, “This is terrible. You can’t even get a blood transfusion if you are poor. We are all human beings”. The woman and her unborn baby both died.
Tracy Kidder, Mountain beyond Mountains. The fight of Dr. Paul Farmer to heal the world. 2003
No matter what your background, whether it be nationality, race, socio-economic status or anything in between, everyone’s life is of equal value. We often become complacent with the systems we live by and helping others can depend heavily on where you are located and how much resources you have available to you. Dr. Farmer knew this when he traveled to Haiti and witnessed firsthand the injustice many people were facing due to a lack of access to quality healthcare services. Despite his best efforts to help one family in particular who had a five year old daughter that needed medical attention they did not receive, even his hard work could not get them the money they required for treatment; as documented in Tracy Kidder’s phenomenal biography about Dr. Farmer’s journey through Haiti. His frustration at being unable to bring justice for these patients lead him down another path – raising enough money for blood-bank equipment for an entire hospital – something Marcus Aurelius himself would have been proud of: taking action instead of just simply wishing for change or feeling like there was no hope left within him after seeing so much suffering around him.
Doctors everywhere feel similar frustrations every day when treatments don’t go as planned or they are unable to provide effective care due to limited resources during times such as pandemics like COVID-19 which has placed us all into difficult ethical conversations trying our best figure out what is fair under certain circumstances despite different laws from state-to-state and different levels of resource availability across America. In the end though, it comes down each doctor’s individual humanity that leads them make their decisions about what is right regardless of pre-determined guidelines set forth by organizations outside their control.
“To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.” (10.16) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
