I recently watched a movie called “Wit” that I believe has connections with the material we have learned throughout this course. This movie is about an English professor who has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. During her story, she reflects on how the stages of cancer reacts to her body, the treatments, and the events that are significant in her life. The hardest part watching this movie is the way that she gets treated while living in the hospital, she is looked over by her doctor who doesn’t care about any aspect of her feelings, but only the results of how she reacts to the treatments. Her nurse is the only one who cares for Vivian’s condition because growing up Vivian wasn’t the nice person who made friends. She kept to herself and was successful teaching her class in college. This reminded me of some material we talked about in our course regarding power. Like Vivian talked about in the movie, she was always the one asking the questions and in charge, but this cancer has put her able to be treated like a number, powerless and relying on others to take care of her. This is just one of the many issues that are shown throughout the movie. When we talk about healthcare, we tend to think positive and how you come into the field wanted to connect with your patients. In the movie, Vivian was treated more like a research study because of the treatment that she was receiving. Her doctor was one of her old students that she taught and didn’t give much respect to her name. The sad reality is once you become sick you lose your identity, you are a patient and nothing more. Vivian is faced with her diagnosis of cancer and not having anyone to take care of her because of her actions and mean attitude of years of teaching. She loses her identity of herself and the bearing the pain is to much as she goes through her treatment. She spent her whole life talking about death talking about death, but when she faces this she seems powerless and hopeless. This movie shows how power can be shifted and taken away and the struggle it causes, but more importantly the issues regarding the healthcare system of injustice. The connection that you make with patients is important because it is part of their treatment to have a support system that cares about you. Overall this movie was hard to watch, but it represented the issues we spoke about in this course as well.
