WHERE I HAVE TO GO

Occasionally there are moments of clarity and purpose. Moments when I realize that I am exactly who and where I need to be. Prior to one such moment today a patient unraveled before me saying that she would gladly take my cancer as her own. At first I took this as a deep gesture of devotion from a doting patient. I felt like Sally Field at the Academy Awards, “You love me…You really love me!!!” Then came the moment. My patient’s red eyes welled with tears, and she rolled into a litany of her woes. A widow in her forties, she was now fifty-six. Her second husband is in his eighties and frail, but has been a good companion. She is in chronic pain, which none of her doctors can seem to cure. She is restless and tired, hoards Ambien like treasure, and takes pain medicine like candy. She is unhappy, desperately unhappy, and she is addicted to drugs. She does not love me, although I have no doubt she would like me to have a full and happy life, she does not love me. She wants to die.

In revealing all this, I can tell she feels better already. She describes her young granddaughter, for whom she would like to scrape through a few more years, just to watch her grow. We joke about the new bar-coded, state issued prescriptions mandated just this month that will eventually, hopefully, mean the demise of her secret stashes. I make her promise to see her gynecologist who she hasn’t visited since her hysterectomy, to make sure that she doesn’t have what I have. She feels better as she leaves, and promises also to badger my office staff during my upcoming medical leave, for progress reports.

My patients don’t love me. They can’t. But they need me. And I need them. My work, my patients… it is where I have to go.


Read The Waking, by Theodore Roethke.