Fences and Elbow Room

Today while waiting for a cholecystectomy, my team of one attending, two residents, and two medical students sat in the physician's lounge chatting about various subjects. My attending raised the issue of how everyone in his affluent neighborhood was putting up fences around their yards. It was silly, my attending bemused, how our relationships with our neighbors were becoming increasingly defined by such a strict sense of privacy.

Sometime later in the conversation, my attending went on to share this story.

"So I took my kids to Disneyland and my son was all up in people's butts the whole time. I had to finally pull him aside and tell him that part of what defines Americans is how we want our elbow room," He propped his elbows up accordingly to show how he symbolically demonstrated to his young toddler the concept of privacy.

"And," he continued, "for the rest of our time there, my son was walking around with his elbows like this," he repeated the gesture a second time.

Thinking back to this conversation, I realize that the hospital is the exact antithesis of the coveted privacy that Americans pursue. Here, a patient is stripped down to their most basic needs (pain, passing flatus, urinating, ambulating, and appetite). In order to receive help, he must be examined, poked, prodded, cut open, and assisted in rudimentary clothing (the hospital gown) by strangers not of the patient's choosing. He is furthermore forced to trust strangers with their most intimate details (sexual history and social history) with really no way to ensure that their confidentiality will be preserved (nurse gossip anyone?). This is both uncomfortably alarming and yet intrinsically necessary to the current health care process (because even the nurse gossip becomes a way to preserve the sanity of the participating parties).

If people were willing to subject themselves to such treatment for the sake of personal health, how different our society would be if we were willing to place ourselves in similarly compromising situations for the sake of our fellow man?