perhaps i should become a better listener.

The other day I met a very average woman. She was kind and talkative, and other than the scar on her neck, I don't know that I would be able to accurately pick her out of a crowd of 20 people.
Obviously, you don't typically make note of someone like this until they surprise you, which is precisely my point: until I welcomed her conversation, I would never have imagined the fantastically tragic stories that this seemingly dull woman could vividly recall. It makes me wonder what else I could know if I only I took a little more time to listen.
In very few words, this petite, graceful woman, Ana (which was not her birth name), found herself in need of thyroid surgery at the age of 20. Having been born in Vietnam where she still lived at this point, she wasn't too shocked to hear that she would be going under the knife sans anesthesia and oxygen, due to the shortage in the hospital. Not only could she feel each cut, but her own mother was given the task of bracing her head against the table, warned that any sudden movement would risk severing a main artery. Once she was out of surgery, she shared a large hospital bed with 9 others, one of which was dying of cancer and whose daily treatment was the doctor coming in to attempt "pushing hard enough on it that it would break into pieces."
Ana clearly made it through surgery, but, when the nurse later violently ripped the gauze from inside her neck, which separated the internal and external stitches, she caused internal bleeding that led to near-suffocation and a need to re-open the wound, again without anesthesia, drain the blood from her lung, and repair the incision. The only reason Ana is alive to tell this story is because her brother searched her small village until he found the doctor, who then reluctantly came to her aid.
I feel like helping her to become a spokesperson for a medical malpractice insurance advocacy group: there are entirely too many people in this country who take for granted the efforts of doctors that have done their best to save lives and limbs. In their ignorance and hasty lawsuits, we surely lose some of the passion that drives the men and women whose desire to help has led them to practice medicine.