A trip to Florida is not something I would usually pick if given my choices of places to travel to. As a child my family and I spent several Christmas vacations and some summers (why would you ‘summer’ in Florida?) there and the state never did much for me. So when my wife was assigned her oral board examination (for her Anesthesia board certification) in Fort Lauderdale, I was not totally thrilled. Plus the fact we are taking a ‘pseudo-vacation’ that costs way more (the test fees alone were $2000) than a preferred trip to the mountains of West Virginia. We are in a recession after all. But thus is just another cost in becoming a physician.

    Now that we are here, I have found some interesting and nice things about this beach city. First thing of course is the fact Boston is still stuck with weather in the 40s, while it has been mid 80s here. Also this city is incredible clean, with no visible trash or clutter on the streets of the beaches. And as for restaurants, the River Walk area has tons of choices, including a chocolate and Ice Cream parlor I could live in.

    The most eye-opening thing about this city is the wealth that is here. Fort Lauderdale is on the ocean and has several small causeways that have been built to accommodate all the massive yachts and the massive yacht owners’ homes. When I say yachts, I mean 4 or 5 million dollar tri-decked, 160 foot, dual 2,500 hp engined, aluminum hulled monsters that can hold dozens of passengers and needs a crew to man. These are the perfect vessels for that easy trip to the Bahamas with a few dozen of your closets drunken friends. As we walked from our cozy but inflated Courtyard by Marriot to the River Walk, we pasted dozens of these causeways containing hundreds of these boats that Thurston Howl III would be envious of. On a map these causeways look like fingers and the boats are the 5-karat diamonds rings on those fingers.

    For some reason I don’t think these causeway folks are feeling the recession quite like the rest of us. I tried to ask a man pulling into one of the causeways in a new Rolls Royce about how he would survive these troubled economic times, but he just flicked his cigar at me and sped away. When I tried to walk up to one of these 10,000 square foot homes that have the dock for the 2,000 square foot boat, the locked gate at the entrance to each street stopped me. I tried to ask the security guard at the gate, how many of those homes (or boats) were owned by physicians but he didn’t seem to understand the concept. I also saw that if I had made it past the gate, or the guard I would have run into a second gate that is around each home. Safe indeed.

    So we just kept walking and I kept thinking about for someone to have that kind of success and to afford such indulgent things, one thing for sure had to happen. Someone else had to get screwed. Like diamond miners in Zimbabwe, coltan miners in The Congo or 10 year olds in China making the Speedos for our Olympic athletes, someone gets hosed for someone else to make that kind of money. I am all for a Capitalist free-market but not a socially conscious free-market.

    After about a mile we did finally find a physician. There is doctor’s office in a small building in between these causeways and the start of downtown Fort Lauderdale. The office seemed to be closed and a man in a long white coat left the building and got in his car. As I watched him as his late 1990s Honda Civic took a left and drove AWAY from the mansions and yachts, I wondered how the recession was affecting him.