Now I'm thinking too hard about some of the surgeons and my personal headcanons for them again, god fucking help me.
Thinking about Hawkeye raised in a rural community with Daniel being more of a horse-and-buggy doctor who made house calls just as often as he saw people in his office or his home. Thinking about Hawk who was a child when he was first needed to hold pressure on a belly wound, not yet a teenager when he became the only person who could assist if someone made it to the Pierce house in the middle of the night and needed emergency care. Thinking about how money never even occurred to him because Daniel's been getting paid more often in eggs and bread and fresh crops and delicious fish and services in turn for as long as Hawk's been alive. A man who walked into medical school already having seen and experienced far, far more of the visceral parts of surgery than anybody else there, who got mistaken for a prodigy, who never thought to correct them but instead expected them all to keep up.
Thinking about Trapper growing up in the thick of Boston slums where it was so much harder to get adequate healthcare, just a kid hearing about how almost all of his friends were supposed to have a baby sibling on the way, but now they're not. How often the men in his area—physical laborers—would be laid off after they lost a limb, how it would pull his friends out of school one by one once they completed their requisite education because they needed to work when their parents no longer could. How many times he had to see someone sick or injured and having nowhere to go for care because they couldn't afford it, coughing on the side of the road, bleeding in an alley. A man who walked into medical school with more fucking determination than anyone else there, gritted teeth, fire in his chest, because he'd be damned if he watched that cycle continue.
Thinking about BJ in a fine home, expensive neighborhood, upper class, parents determined to tick their way up the ladder into new money by marrying their kids into wealthier families so that by extension, they can experience the height of luxury. His grandfather's legacy which led to his father's excellent private practice, high prices, tied up neatly in a bow of how disdainfully he'd often speak of his patients or colleagues at home. The Depression hitting and wiping out his father's and grandfather's money—stored in banks, in stocks, in bonds—instantaneously, and how his father had to pivot to barely making anything because there was so little that his patients could give, and how cold it made him because why should he be a surgeon if he doesn't even get paid for his work? Why should he help anybody at all when he'd receive so little personal benefit? A full eighteen years immersed in his father's bitterness, every minute spent distancing himself from him. A man who walked into medical school having already cut them off cleanly, a mission in his chest, the drive to provide care out of compassion, his principles already firmly locked in place, his desire to be the best out of anybody else around him so that no one ever has to feel like they need to beg him so that he would deign to save their life.
I'm unwell about the surgeons. I don't know if y'all knew this or not.
