RESEARCH REPORT Poem by Nachoem M. Wijnberg

I talk to doctors who have won the lottery: immediately after they have heard the news and then every two, three years.
The first time I ask them what they are planning to do with the money; later I ask what they have done with it.
They are almost always willing to answer, even when they have lost it all again, and the first time I talk to them I do not contradict them if they think I work for the lottery.
There are only a few who have lost it all, most of them have bought a new house and something else they had always wanted and put the rest in a bank account.
Of all the doctors I talk to, there is only one whose wife left him after he had won.
It made him feel sick at heart for a few days, but he also once spent a week longing for a woman who was dead.
At the end of that week the longing diminished, but then he realised that he had now really lost her.
Most contented are the ones who give some of it away each year, to a local hospital, for instance, to buy a new bed.
If I could do something new this late in life I would study medicine, because doctors try even harder for colleagues.
The sick doctors I talk to tell me that's really true, and that it's a shame they can't possibly see me as a colleague.
Not even if I had studied everything they have studied, because if I had already done something else before, I could be a doctor and do something else on the side, or I would know what they know in a different way, because of studying it so late.