I’m an oncologist. When online, it drives me mad and almost personally offended (at least to the extent a hardened former Twitter and Reddit user can be offended!) when I come across variants of the old ”cancer care does more harm than good” trope. If so, I’d have quit my job and chosen a way more lucrative specialty. Interestingly, I almost never encounter that type of argument in real life, only by random people on the internet.
Instead, people IRL seem rather convinced that we wade in pain, sorrow and grief all day. Sometimes, that results in me holding a speech about how much I get back from my patients, the joy of curing someone from metastatic melanoma, or how I somehow end up having a good laugh with someone almost every day at work. I usually can’t summon that kind of patience, though.