A short Excerpt, "The Real Weakness"

“Is it?”, Rakshita wondered, as the Ophthalmology professor asked them to be empathetic with the patients, as it only then that doctors could really treat those who came to them. As she had grown in the College, it was one thing that was increasingly getting ingrained in Rakshita’s mind that it is only when Doctors treat their patients as inanimate objects, as machines in which something had gone wrong, could they maintain their sanity.
If a doctor tried to empathize with its patients, he grew close to them over a period of time, and more often than not, if something got screwed, the doctor’s head became a blast furnace. Rakshita recalled a story Nidhi had once told her about a senior of theirs. While he, let us call him John Doe (the common parlance in Medicine for an unidentified person), was completing his internship, starting with the surgical department, he was committed to be a feeling, empathetic person while dealing with the patients. In the two months that he spent with surgery, and in a month of Orthopaedics, he saw so much pain and despair around him, that he had gone into a nervous breakdown. He had to be started on Psychiatric treatment and counseling, despite which he had committed suicide by consuming poison in the Doctor’s Duty Room of the Medicine ward.
‘Is the stress simply unbearable for all of us, or is it only the weak that wither?’ wondered Rakshita, as a question from the Professor jolted her out of her thoughts. ‘Tell me the differential diagnosis of a Red Eye?, and the next time you come to my ward, leave your non-medical thoughts behind.’ Wasn’t it ironical, Rakshita thought, that the professor had asked her about Red Eye, something which most commonly manifests after a person has cried his eyes out. She really felt like crying, as it might have relieved her of some of the stress that she had accumulated over the past two weeks.