A Little Bit of Knowledge

My cat was limping last night. He’s fine this morning. He probably jumped and landed wrong. Of course, having gone to acupuncture school and worked at a vet, my mind immediately went to the worst possible diagnosis. “Oh no! Does he have bone cancer?!”

It reminded me of being in acupuncture school and we had Western Pathology or something like that. We were to learn about various western pathologies and when we needed to refer to a doctor.

Our professor had taught at the school since the beginning so he was used to to students. He’d gone to naturopathic school after being a teacher for a number of years so he was good at anticipating what would happen.

There’s an obscure disease that mostly manifests in men older than sixty which presents with fatigue, digestive upset, and difficulty concentrating. The class was probably 80% female and most of us were younger than fifty.

Before he even began, Joe stood up there and looked at us, “Just for the record, you all do NOT have this disease. Most of you aren’t men over sixty and most of your symptoms are normal for acupuncture students.”

Even having had him say that, I know we all found ourselves wondering, “What if.” It’s something called medical school disease where you start learning about all these things and every single symptom seems to be ready to kill you. The panic doubles when you’ve worked for a vet and the symptoms are from your cat.

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