Thoughts for Saturday, November 25, 2017

 "People often ask physicians how we handle the emotional stress of dealing with ill children. What are our defense mechanisms? Do we practice a cool detachment? Do we shut off our emotions completely? Or do we go home at the end of the day and sob over a reheated dinner? ...The truth is that we are trained to do a job: recognize a problem, come up with a solution and execute that plan. Our ability to actually do something protects us from what you might expect would be a chronic depressive state. We feed off the satisfaction of being able to help and we know that things would be worse if we didn't or couldn't, do anything. For that reason, the experience of taking care of sick kids is much different from a hopeless walk through a pediatric ward as a visitor." - Katrina Firlik, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe - A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside

Girl With 'Crooked' Smile From Cancer Treatments Kills Herself

Girl With 'Crooked' Smile From Cancer Treatments Kills Herself - newser.com

Excerpt from this article:

"An 11-year-old girl who fought cancer as a preschooler and won killed herself last month after what mom Wendy Feucht describes as unceasing bullying, CNN reports. Bethany Thompson, a sixth-grader in Cable, Ohio, had been free of cancer after undergoing radiation therapy for a brain tumor at the age of 3, but the treatments marred her nerves, leaving her with a 'crooked 'smile. That, along with her curly hair, led to the bullying against Bethany, particularly by a certain group of boys—and on Oct. 19, after telling her best friend she was going to end her life, Bethany hunted for and found a loaded handgun on a high shelf inside her family's home and shot herself before her friend's father could contact Bethany's mom, says Paul Thompson, Bethany's dad, per the Columbus Dispatch.

Triad Middle School was aware of the bullying..." (My emphasis)
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 Who is to blame for bullying? The Bully? Or the teachers and  staff at the school who know its going on and turn their heads?

Recommended reading:

I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise - Children Surviving Cancer, by Erma Bombeck