Justify Your Vice

You went into the doctor’s lounge, saw that you were alone, and quickly appropriated one-half of the last chocolate covered doughnut, leaving the remainder and a dried out bagel for the last poor joker of a doctor on the half-a-doughnut diet who wandered in. I know it was you. Being a doctor in a hospital and having recently remaintained your certification via a quality improvement study of your own hand-washing habits, fabricating exactly none of the data, you used a plastic knife and only minimally touched the remaining part of the pastry in question, which I later stuffed into my mouth whole hog and washed down with the last bit of coffee in the urn. I of course did not make more coffee; I’m a busy man and that’s not my job. Surely the surgeons are looking for an excuse not to round or the infectious disease folks will soon be stopping by to push Sisyphus’ rock up the hill of antibiotic choice for lateral neck abscesses. One of them can do it. I do, however, have time to stand around for a bit to facilitate my digestion and to peruse the pictures in the newspaper before I render the lounge bathroom unusable for the next 30 minutes.

We all have our guilty pleasures, some openly displayed for all to see, some hidden downstairs under the fluorescents for the inquisitive to discover,¹ and some merely housed in the back recesses of the mind. Maybe the occasional demon rum intake, maybe a surreptitious heist of the kids’ painstakingly obtained Halloween candy, maybe things we do not dare mention. The vices of the pediatrician pale in comparison with those of the average rock-souled criminal, or at least I would like to believe, but let us not pretend that we maintain the …