Winners

Okay, this is going to be a snippy little blog, I admit it.

Every Sunday the ritual at my house is to read the NewYork Times Style Section for the wedding announcements. Wedding advertisements, really. But that's another rant.

My wife refuses to allow me to read them aloud. I used to do this, but it interrupted her doing the crossword puzzle and as she has gotten older, she will not broke interruptions to the things which really matter in life.

So, now the ritual is we read them separately and then comment on them, without mentioning names, but just the schools, the little stories they tell about how they met, we refer to these later in the day, as we are walking the dog. It's actually even more fun that way.

This Sunday, there was a real gem. She was magna cum laude, Harvard College. Then Johns Hopkins medical school. He was magna cum laude, Princeton, then Harvard Med.

She went on to get into the hardest of all subspecialties to get, dermatology. He went on to another difficult field in which the competition for a residency is intense: plastic surgery.

They meet at a "recruiting dinner," at Hopkins and he is attracted to her and she is not interested because she has a rule about not dating residents in the same institution because she has watched Scrubs, or some television show which depicts the torrid bedroom life of medical trainees who spend very little time thinking about patients and quite a lot of time thinking about which hot ticket in scrubs they want to bed next.

Her rule is grounded firmly in Fox TV.

As luck would have it, they meet over a patient they see together the next morning and he is blown away by "the compassion she showed as a dermatologist."

And there you have it.

My wife, being of the medical world did not have to explain, she simply drawled, "the compassionate dermatologist."

Now, I love my dermatologist. But, truth be told, dermatologists are dentists with MD's. They work hard, moving quickly room to room, excising and snipping and burning and freezing, but compassion is not really part of the game. Dermatologists make an exorbitant amount of money, the highest paid specialty, with virtually no on call, no hospitalized patients and low malpractice premiums. It's the ideal specialty and there are seventy applicants for every training spot. Women, in particular, strive to get derm residencies because you can bill like a star and still get home to greet the kids as they come home from school. Your patients, in general, do not die or ever get very sick and they are pretty grateful because they usually improve. It's a great specialty.

And, I have known plastic surgeons I respected enormously--the reconstructive guys who take a woman who's lost a breast and they try to restore some sense of body image, or they repair an abraded or lacerated face after an auto accident.

But, you and I both know this particular Princeton product, this particular plastic surgeon is not of that ilk. He is Nip Tuck, and all about thread counts in the bed linen.

Can you imagine what their dining room looks like? And his car? What does he drive? Hers is a little easier to imagine, but with him, well you could spend hours speculating. This would be a very important part of him. And, if you really want to run wild, think of their children. Think of their children's rites of passage--birthday parties, weddings.

Their whole lives stretch out before us. They are what immigrants dream about, well Asian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, when they dream about America. They are real lace. They are beyond real lace. These are the people reality shows will be built around in the future.

These are the Warner Brothers lot people, all front, but when you look behind, what is there?

My patients need compassion. Her patients need compassion. We are passionate about what we do, because, after all, look at the dire circumstances we help our patients through, that woman with the acne, at age thirty. That woman with the puppet lines running from the corners of her mouth to her jaw. They need help and they need compassion. And maybe some botox.

It is true, the dermatologist worked, for some part of her day, on an incurable disease, scleroderma, for which neither plastic surgeons nor dermatologists have a single useful thing to offer. But those scleroderma patients afford them a few minutes of the day during which they can develop the compassionate side of themselves.

It's like flying to Tanzania for five days and getting pictures taken of you in your scrubs with your arms around native children, before your airplane returns you to the safety of your plush office Stateside.

I told you it was going to be snippy.

But, oh, please. The compassionate dermatologist and the Nip Tuck plastics guy she won by touching his perfect body with her mind.