2007年NPR美国国家公共电台五月-Every Person Is Precious（在线收听） |
| From NPR News, this is weekend edition. I'm Liane Hanson. I believe in mystery. I believe in family. I believe in being who I am. I believe in the power of failure. And I believe normal life is extraordinary. This I Believe. For our regular series--This I Believe, we've been asking you for your contributions. Today we have an essay sent to us by Isabel Legarda, a Belmont Massachusetts. Legarda is a thirty-five-year-old mother of two. She's recently completed her residency and is aboard certified anesthesiologist. Here is our series curator, independent producer Jay Allison. For some people who write for our series their work is the expression of their belief. The belief comes first and the action follows. That's true for Isabel Legarda, but her work, and its simple essential tasks, confirms her conviction even when it wavers. As you'll hear in her essay for This I Believe. I'm often asked why I chose to be an anesthesiologist. The truest answer I give is that anesthesiology is a spiritual work. The word spiritual can have different meanings. I think of the Latin root-spiritus, breath, inspiration. Words that resound in both medicine and faith. Words that help define my life and work. My spirituality has evolved hand-in-hand with my becoming a physician. In medical school, a classmate and I once found ourselves talking not about science but about faith. We had been raised in different traditions, and he asked me, "If you could verbalize in one sentence the single most important idea at the heart of your religion, what would you say?" I imagined my religion at its origins, untouched by history. No canon of stories, traditions, rituals, no trappings — one sentence to distill everything that mattered? I paused for a second before it came to me, like a sudden breath: Every person is precious. That was the core of my faith. But when I finished medical school and started residency, my spiritual life began to fray at the edges. I couldn't reconcile the suffering of children with the idea of a merciful God. Once, while making rounds, I unintentionally walked in on parents praying ardently at their infant daughter's hospital bed. Though I was moved, I remembered wondering if it was any use. I struggled to make spiritual connections. The moment I chose my specialty, though, I began suturing together some of those tattered edges of faith. One day, an anesthesiologist taught me how to give manual breaths — to breathe for a child while he couldn't breathe for himself. On that day, my life turned. I took on the responsibility of sustaining the life-breath of others, and slowly I opened up to spirit once again. Now, whenever I listen to patients' breath sounds while squeezing oxygen into their lungs or intervening when their blood pressures sag, when I hold their hands or dry their tears, I find myself literally in touch with the sacred. Perhaps for some, this degree of control creates a sense of power. For me, it is profoundly humbling. I realize that if I forget I am standing on holy ground in the O.R. and fail to approach my patients for reverence, I risk their lives. Every person is precious: This I believe with my whole heart. Each time I keep watch over patients and protect them when they're most vulnerable, my faith comes alive. It catches breath: spiritus. Isabel Legarda with her essay for This I Believe. One of Leagrda's main influences was her anatomy professor, a Franciscan priest. She told us some mornings, she would hear him talk about the embryologic origin of the duodenum and then attend his new mass to hear him connect scripture to the rest of life. We welcome all your essays in our series. And at npr.org/thisibelieve, you can find out how to submit and read what others have written. For This I Believe, I'm Jay Allison. In two weeks we'll bring you another essay in our series from Michael Oldman of Cleveland, Ohio on the belief which took him off the streets and gave him a future he hadn't imagined. This I Believe is independently produced by Jay Allison, Dan Gediman, John Gregory and Viki Merrick. Support for This I Believe comes from Prudential Retirement. |
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