As stated previously, my primary means of making that delicious green substance called “money” is working on, and replacing, computers in a hospital environment. The job is straightforward, really. Most of the computers (With the exception of some really old ones that the hospital has purchased and now owns) are leased from IBM. When the lease expires, IBM ships us a new model and we go out and replace the old computer with the new one. Problem is, the lease expires on several thousand computers at a time, so the job is really quite large. And of course, as with any job this large, mistakes are bound to happen. People aren’t in their offices, their computers have been switched with someone else’s computer (Which happens a lot more than it should, really.) or, sometimes, it’s just plain gone.
This entry, however, is not about my job.
About a week ago, I was out replacing computers on the fifth floor of the children’s hospital that adjoins the main hospital. It’s mostly offices for doctors and nurses. The helicopter flight team also sleeps up there, along with a large playroom for sick kids. Said playroom is filled mostly with toys for smaller kids, toys which include a large wooden box filled with white rice and sandbox toys. For the older patients, there is a Playstation 2 and an XBox with some family-friendly, ESRB-rated “E” games. I had finished putting out all the computers I could for the time being, and had to wait for my partner to finish. Not being in the mood to go back to the office and sit around, I wandered over to the XBox in the playroom. I chatted with the workers, and during the course of this conversation I found out that one of the controllers was broken, so after work the following day, I went up to try to repair it. I made friends with the two kids in the room – a boy about 14, and a girl about 11 – while I fixed the controller. I found out that the boy (He looked like a “Dylan” to me) was being released in a few days, and the girl (Looked like a “Katie”) had been here two weeks and had to stay one more. I eventually ended up fixing the XBox controller, and just for fun came back a few times after work to play with the kids. I played Gran Turismo with Dylan, and after he was discharged, softball with Katie. (The version where you play with a plastic giraffe and a rubber ball, much to the amusment of the playroom supervisors.) I spent Friday night with her up on the fourth floor, watching Finding Nemo, solving those slide-around number puzzles, playing Mario Kart, which I suck at, and softball in the hallways with a recorder and a foam ball.
I have never met such an energetic, outgoing child – she ran nearly everywhere, did cartwheels, and jumped around. She was also one of those people who has a quick answer for just about everything, leading one of the nurses to quip sardonically “It’s a shame she has no confidence.”. There is a temptation when around people who are in a hospital to ask why they’re there. I stopped doing that when a kid I asked replied “I have Crohn’s disease.”, however, I couldn’t help but wonder why this child was in the hospital. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to know, nevertheless, I got the answer to my unspoken question Friday night. In the middle of our softball “game”, one of the nurses interrupted us for Katie’s treatment. This curious contraption consisted of a rubber vest with two hoses going into it, which inflated and proceeded to forcefully shake her, like a kid martini. She also held an inhaler in her mouth. (Difficult for her; she kept trying to talk around it while I was losing at Mario Kart.) This went on for about ten minutes, and afterward she was hooked up to an IV and we continued to play games. Curiosity had gotten the better of me, though, and so I had to ask.
Me: Do you have cystic fibrosis?
Her: Yeah – how did you know?
I had guessed. I had picked up enough of the conversations between the nurses and her and her family to piece together that something was up with her lungs, and the martini treatment reminded me of something I had once read. Long story short, a defective gene (ΔF508) causes the body to produce very thick, sticky mucus that sticks to the lungs and causes nasty infections. We spent the rest of the night continuing to play softball (after her IV was unhooked) and videogames until it was time for her to go to bed. (Side note: playing softball in the hallways was the most physical activity I’ve experienced in a long time – my legs are still slightly sore from all the running around.) The nurses thanked me – apparently staying in the hospital for three weeks can get pretty boring. And it wasn’t until I was driving home that night that a feeling – a sickening depression – settled over me. And the more I thought about it, the worse it got. This child, this small girl so full of life, had a terminal illness. Due to nothing more than a chance mixture of DNA, she will be lucky to reach age thirty. It’s not as bleak as, say, leukemia, but thirty years is still far too short a time to be alive.
“Oh cruel fate!” bemoaned Homer Simpson. And certainly, “cruel fate” would seem the culprit in the case of an otherwise innocent child having her days cut short by a random convergence of malfunctioning nucleotides. And so it seems foolish to ask “why?”. It’s not a new question, nor has anyone yet come up with a good answer. Perhaps the universe is simply governed by mere chance; a few rolls of a pair of cosmic dice decides whether you live or die from moment to moment. I, however, believe in an all-powerful, good God. And situations like these have a tendency to make me question – no, not question, but rather, re-evaluate those beliefs.
Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does cancer or an automobile gone out of control. Maybe this why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. Nature is morally blind, without values. It churns along, following its own laws, not caring who or what gets in the way. But my God is not morally blind. I could not worship Him if I thought He was. God stands for justice, for fairness, for compassion. Sometimes, of course, pain and death are necesarry. In a world without pain, we wouldn’t know what to avoid. Be it physical or emotional, pain helps keep us human and healthy. And a world without death would quickly become overpopulated. These are both parts of a system that God created – along with the human capacity for choice. Accidents like earthquakes and cystic fibrosis are not the will of God, but instead represent some aspect of the universe that He places independent of his will – and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us. Perhaps for God to suspend the laws of physics and nature – to null and void the effects of choice, no matter what the choice might cost us – would make us all less human.
But that’s easy enough to tell the other guy.