Coping
I'm a medical doctor, a young one. I work in a goverment hospital as an intern and day to day we encounter death and destruction, as well as life. Between 24-36 hour shifts and patients who come in bleeding and with a varying number of complaints, I live a pretty normal life. But I've had a number of my non-medical friends comment and ask me: "ang hirap ng ginagawa mo. How do you do it?" I usually have no answer to tell them. What do you tell someone. Do they thing you're stronger than you are, that you have some insight into the universe afforded by your profession? Quite honestly, my answer to the questions is mostly a shrug, a smile, an "I don't know." And that really is the answer.
I don't know what makes doctors able. We don't have an answer. How do we cope? We just do, any way we can, any way we know how. It is in the nature of our training: we are hurled in head first with all but a net to catch us. Most of what we learn, we learn by doing. We learn with human lives. I suppose that is why the doctor seems to understand so much more about the human psyche than the average person. It's not that we studied these things in medical school (although, we did), but it is because we have to deal with questions about human life on a day to day basis? If we didn't then how would we cope. If we didn't question, if we didn't wonder, then we would never learn.