Thinking more kindly

In 2012 I was in hospital with a bad back. I had contracted something called discitis. It was sheer agony. Most of my ward mates were older guys … seventies and up.

Every now and then, one of the old fellows would be well enough to go home.

In their place, sometimes, came disconsolate youths who, for want of anywhere else to park them, ended up with us old gents.

Usually they were young men who had overdosed on something and now lay gloomily as girlfriends with names like Shania or Jazmyn tried to cheer them up with Instagrams and txts from the homies.

One day I had a bit of an epiphany when and a team of doctors arrived at the bedside of a young Māori boy opposite me.

The kid would have been about 17, and it was clear almost straight away, that the head doctor in the team was pretty ticked off with this youngster.

Apparently the boy had had a heart defect since birth, and had had a number of stays in hospital, many of them the result of him doing some serious drugs.

“Do you want to kill yourself?” this very forthright doctor was asking – “you’ve got a bad heart and when you take drugs you’re at serious risk of dying.”

“You’re an idiot,” he concluded. The boy had nothing to say.

Your mind goes all sorts of places when you hear something like this.

The temptation for a white middle-aged, middle-class male is to say … “yeah, you tell him, doc.”

As I recounted the story to some friends later on, most felt the doctor was spot on. A health system that’s already stretched can do without stupid, self-destructive behaviour.

Pondering further, I recalled so many of the people who need the health system to save them … myself included … are probably just as thoughtless about their personal well-being as that young man getting an earful from the specialist.

Poor diet, insufficient exercise and too much booze costs our health system billions each year. It’s just that those shortcomings aren’t as socially stigmatising as a Māori kid with a dodgy ticker doing drugs.

Age has mellowed me. I have discovered a concept called manaakitanga. It means kindness. It means walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

You should try it.