A Mitzvah: Visiting the Sick

Today I am doing something which might surprise you when I tell you that it something I don't do much anymore

I plan to visit a friend in hospital with complications from his transplant for CLL. Make rounds so to speak.

You would figure as a doc, I would round on patents daily. Not that long ago, I would proudly have said that was the case. Not today. A  family doc, outside of a rural setting, is a specialist in the outpatient setting. It is inefficient and costly for us to care for patients on the hospital wards. And if don't use it, you lose it. Would you want a doc who sees a few patients a month caring for you, or one who sees ten new admissions a day? Actually that may not such an easy question to answer.  

True be told, over the last few years, the rounds I made were mostly social and for patient reassurance. I would review the chart, and check all is on course, and maybe explain the likely trajectory of the healing with a little more time than the hospitalists could afford.

Soon after my CLL diagnosis, I stopped taking hospital call. ERs and acute medical wards are no place for a boy like me with a shaky immune system. 

So this trip to the bedside is actually pretty rare for me.  

I do it, not because I am such a great guy (and if the infection risk is high, I'll back out). No, I do it because it is a commandment, a mitzvah that I visit the sick. I do it for my sake. 

I do it because we are all in this together.