Years of corporate greed and political apathy have left America’s healthcare system barely functional, and that breakdown has placed a terrible burden on the professionals trying their best to provide care: This exhausted doctor at an underfunded hospital has had to shrink down to the size of a white blood cell 15 times today.
Fucking shameful. That’s what you get in a country that values profits over people!
Dr. Bruce Tiernan does everything he can for the patients of his rural Vermont hospital, but budget cuts and staffing shortages have left him swamped with a completely overwhelming workload of microscopic adventures inside his patient’s bodies. Just today, he’s had to step into his Shrink-O-Matic 3000’s smallification chamber no fewer than 15 times, carefully piloting the tiny submarine Triton through the winding passageways of the human body to diagnose and treat patient ailments before finally slipping out through a tear duct to activate his rebiggifier and conducting a quick follow-up. It’s small wonder doctors are experiencing such high rates of burnout when Tiernan can barely find two minutes to return to normal size and gulp some coffee before being shrunk and injected into another patient’s body.
Just today, Tiernan has had to spend a total of more than ten hours at a size of 12 microns tall, braving swift arterial currents and fearsome packs of antibodies in his minuscule submarine. One of this morning’s procedures even involved a perilously close call with the snapping phagosome of an amoeba—an incident that could have been avoided with another set of hands to man the Triton’s laser array—but whenever Tiernan begs the hospital’s private equity ownership to hire more doctors or at least upgrade the Triton’s sluggish evasion thrusters, they just brush him off with the same tired bullshit about “tough economic realities” while hoarding the filthy lucre they wring out of his and others’ suffering.
Those non-stop journeys through treacherous mires of mucous membranes and hissing oceans of stomach acid take a serious physical and mental toll, and fatigue is a dangerous prospect when one false move in a patient’s sinuses could mean being sneezed the equivalent of miles across the room. Tiernan has resourcefully figured out how to sneak in the occasional power nap when a voyage takes him to the pillowy alveoli of the human lungs, but those rare breaks can only do so much. When brutal 20-hour shifts blasting apart blood clots and wrangling thunderous stampedes of spermatozoa are the norm, nothing but deep systemic change can give doctors like Tiernan the relief they so sorely need.
Richest country in the world, by the way. Can’t stress that enough.
“It was already getting bad before COVID, but since the pandemic I probably spend more time riding red blood cells through capillaries like a waterslide than I do walking around the hospital normal size,” said Dr. Tiernan, lamenting that simple stress had ended as many of his colleague’s careers as ambushes by antibiotic-resistant MRSA strains. “We want to help, but when the system stretches you this thin, you’re asking yourself, is this the day I accidentally activate my rebiggifier while I’m still in the patient’s heart? Is this the day I nod off and wrap the Triton around a motor neuron? Is this the day I go into an infected lymph node and never come back out?”
Damn, America’s doctors deserve better than this. Here’s hoping for a future where their safety and well-being comes before someone else’s financial gain!
