“I Could a Tale Unfold Whose Lightest Word Would Harrow Up Thy Soul”
I received a disturbing shock last week while walking through a local shopping mall. It involved the ghost of one of my patients who had recently died. The horror of the situation didn’t hit me at first, but within seconds I was overcome with panic and hurried my pace, afraid to turn around and look again. After I recovered my senses I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering the significance of the event. My emotions alternated between embarrassment and dismay until I finally reached a reconciliation with myself and was able to move on to the remainder of my day.
You see, what happened was not that I saw a ghost, but that I wanted to see a ghost but couldn’t.
While strolling down the hall I saw the wife of a patient of mine who struggled for months to live with metastatic cancer. He was a weekly visitor to my office before finally succumbing to his disease, a patient whose suffering was heartbreaking to observe - truly a memorable patient.
Or so I thought. As I crossed the path of his wife that day, walking just fast enough to be past her before my brain could identify her place in my memory, I suddenly realized that I could not recall the name nor the face of her husband. Too humiliated to turn and call out to her, I wandered on aimlessly, searching and searching for a face to go with hers, the face of a man I once knew well, a face that withered before my eyes and then, like a mask left behind after an elegant affair, was placed inside an old trunk, forgotten forevermore.
Eventually I remembered him and how he sat quietly next to his wife through all those visits, full of misery and apprehension. Now he exists only in the mind, a ghost who can only appear if summoned from the tangled nest of names and faces that, no longer noticed, have faded from memory.
Wherever my patient is now I want him to know that he has not been forgotten - he is welcome to haunt me at his leisure, which I assume is limitless. Like Hamlet pacing on the ramparts of Elsinore, doctors also need to see ghosts. It reminds them of the gravity of their work, of the sorrow that strangles a woman as she walks alone down a corridor crowded with strolling lovers.
My (not so) young blood feels sort of cold, frozen, even…
Comment by Bardiac — May 26, 2006 @ 9:30 pm
You aren’t responsible that cancer eats away our bodies before your eyes, and I’m not so sure that if I saw my Oncologist without the white coat bearing his name and education level I’d recognize him. It’s probably better to forget past patients. Maybe it will insure that you can treat the present ones without slipping into insanity.
Comment by emmy — May 27, 2006 @ 7:20 pm
May God bless your heart and hands, I pray he also gives you the help to deal with the losses. Personally I’ve been thru 2 cancer losses and frankly it scares the heck out of me. It’s helpful to know that Dr’s “feel” after so many cases.
Comment by Sweeti — May 27, 2006 @ 8:32 pm
Simply beautiful!
Again, thanks for this wonderful piece of writing.
Comment by ipanema — May 28, 2006 @ 6:09 am
That was a wonderful entry.
Comment by Ali — May 28, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
O.C. Your a wonderful kind Onc. Your patients are so lucky to have you. My Onc is great, she isn’t the type to be all mushy, but on my last visit with her, she almost cried.
Have a good weekend, O.C.
Comment by cheryl — May 28, 2006 @ 8:59 pm
you need a hug
Comment by Feisty — May 30, 2006 @ 3:12 am
For those of us with cancer, even those of us with metastatic cancer, each day we are given can be and is a joy. When we do “slip the surly bonds of earth” it is due to a disease, not the failures of those we love, or the failures of those that decide to take care of us knowing they fight an implacable foe. Today I’m alive and full of The Joy of Living ~ Even With Cancer
Comment by GM Roper — May 30, 2006 @ 10:53 pm
Wow. My husband is a detective and he has been haunted by some of the things he has seen. It is one of the things that goes with the territory. There is something about death that makes us feel guily even when it is unavoidable. It’s amazing that when you see death a lot you can joke about it one moment and be seriously distrubed in the next.
Comment by Molly — May 31, 2006 @ 2:37 pm
Excellent passage..beautiful! You sound like a fantastic doctor.
Comment by Savannah — May 31, 2006 @ 7:10 pm
Docs like you are special. My mom passed from cancer along time ago and she had a special doc like you. I am glade to see that some still care!! Just be careful that it dosn’t tear you up ok. We need all the special docs that are left… There are so few
Comment by wolfbaby — June 2, 2006 @ 6:50 am
Poetry. A present of words. Do your patients have any idea how fortunate they are?
Comment by Kristi — June 3, 2006 @ 2:48 pm
Many cancer patients have already written to say how lucky they think your patients are, and I do concur. I am, simply, grateful to find an MD who will freely exhibit an emotional link with patients, not being, in the words of a friend, “you know, all cold and doctory..”. Thanks.
Comment by Nancy Brownlee — June 5, 2006 @ 9:22 pm
Thank you very very much! You made my life so much easier!
Comment by Nick — October 12, 2006 @ 4:31 am
Its amazing how hard we try to pretend that nothing effects us but I think most of us are haunted by one patient or another
Comment by irishdoc — October 29, 2006 @ 6:13 am
Congrats!
Comment by Michael — October 30, 2006 @ 3:14 am
hello to all fo you !!!
Comment by marchello — February 25, 2007 @ 10:28 am
Thank you for this. I lost my wife to metastatic gastric carcinoma that started 8 years ago and lasted five months. I could not help but also feel for the chemo and radiation oncologists who were administering what we all knew was palliative treatment.
Comment by Steve W — September 26, 2007 @ 3:19 pm
That last sentence made me cry. I lost my brother to cancer last year - he was young. I remember walking through the mall with him several months before he died. Now when I dare to walk through the same mall, I can barely face it…
Comment by andanotherthing — March 30, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
How easily faces fade from our memories, it is so clear to start with then blurs at the edges until a focussed view is just always out of reach
Comment by John — April 18, 2008 @ 1:51 pm