Even years of being a doctor couldn't prepare me for this.
Written by Gerrishon Sirere as narrated by Anna Fels
A colleague who's an oncologist called to say he had referred a patient to me. I thanked him and didn't think much about it until I was seated opposite the patient, an elderly man. After the opening pleasantries, I asked him to tell me what had brought him to see me. He paused a moment and then replied, "Death, I suppose."
I copied down his response and looked at the sheet, feeling a sensation of queasy helplessness and confusion.
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| I copied down his response and looked at the sheet, feeling a sensation of queasy helplessness and confusion. |
Why was this man seeing a psychiatrist and not a family member or minister or a rabbi? "Actually, I don't want to mislead you," he said. "It's not really death. It's the dying that's the problem." Now I was really lost.
"I can't bear the sickness. I hate the hospital, the chemotherapy, the nausea. I'm becoming someone else. But I don't want to endlessly talk about it, particularly with my wife. She's got enough to deal with."
To my chagrin, I realized that despite having been a medical doctor before becoming a psychiatrist, I had never heard the step by step narrative of a patient's sickness. "You'll have to educate me," I told him.
He began with the diagnosis, after which his life was never the same. And then the waiting, the hospital lights on day and night, the thick, sweet smell of the hospital floor was, the hapless interns, the relentlessly upbeat physician.
Over several sessions his story continued, and I think both the patient and I were surprised at how much better he began to feel. This was not the classic psychotherapy of unconscious motives. Nor was it just hand holding. I suspect that for this man the isolation imposed by the impersonal, alien world of illness had become almost as debilitating as the illness itself. Having someone else who "gets it" somehow brought the patient back into the shared social world.
Several months later my patient went into the hospital for what would clearly be the last time.
He declined to see me because he was so heavily medicated for his pain. But after his death his wife called to say he had left a note for me.
I received it in the mail several days later. It said, in the large scrawl of someone sedated with narcotics, "Thinking of our talks."
So was I.
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