I'm Adali Mone and this is The Slowdown.

I think a great deal about the condition called compassion fatigue and how it affects

our teachers, our caregivers, and our medical professionals.

I see the weariness on their faces in their eyes that brightness of purpose is shadowed by

a grief and a knowing that I could not even begin to imagine.

I find myself wanting more and more to offer something to those who give so much despite

all the losses.

Today's poem is striking in how it makes space for both the patient and the doctor and

urges the listener to remember the humanity in all of us.

The point by C. Dale Young, his other doctors proclaimed that he would die within a month.

He kept on living for years.

The simple fact is that he was barely thirty but had been dying for almost two of them.

The urge for prophecy is deep and deeply rooted inside the gnarled and human heart.

We seek it out, its shiny metallic edge, the cancer spread to his bones and then his

liver.

Each time it reappeared, we treated it with radiation.

We stalled it, held it back, until it spread to his lungs, making every treatment that

I proposed seem less and less an option.

So this is it.

You're just going to let me die, mano.

You leave me here to die like this.

And here you see, the tongue is wiser than a knife.

...