And yes it is necessary to admit walking in the forest the heart is a lock
it has inviolable chambers like the woods, fallen trees that block
access to the river snowdrops surprising its edges moss crystalline with frost
What I thought I wanted what I have tried to be was the slender instrument that opened
a key: presence moving deeper into the forest that releases the birds from the trees and sends them ascends them to sky by definition open
but now there is nothing left to be solved like a riddle
this time the lock must be broken what’s left has to be seized
because God only loves the strong thief I mean the man who breaks his heart for God ~Jennifer Grotz, “Locked” from Window Left Open
All my life I wanted to be an effective key, unlocking life’s mysteries and opening up the world to those who are hopeless, stifled and trapped. Doctor training gave me a few locksmith tools. I found my patients taught me far more about their pain and suffering than my professors did.
Yet profound mysteries remain: some illnesses are rare or unique enough to defy diagnosis, some just don’t respond to available tools, while illnesses as well understood and treatable as depression or COVID infection still kill and incapacitate with abandon. The keys I may have accumulated don’t fit every lock. They don’t necessarily open the doors to freedom from fear or worry.
At times I feel aimless, wondering what tools I still have and if I remember how to use them. Simple knowledge is only one key, while brute force – breaking and entering – may be necessary to break the hardest lock of all – access to the troubled heart and soul.
God wants in, to pick up our broken pieces and put us back together. He doesn’t need a key to enter what He Himself has built from scratch. He owns the place.
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When I was sick with a head cold, my head full of pressure, my father would soak a washcloth in hot water, then ball it up, ring it out. He would open it above my head, then place it against my face like a second skin, the light around me disappearing entirely except through the spaces between the stitching. I would inhale the steam in that darkness, hearing his voice on the other side, otherwise almost devoid of any other bodily sense but the warmth and depth of his voice, as if I had already died and was on the other side of life waiting for the sickness to lift, but I wasn’t. I was still on this earth, the washcloth going cold on my face, my body still sick, and my father still there when I opened my eyes, as he always was, there to give me warmth before going cold again. ~William Fargason “Elegy with Steam”
A common clinic conversation this time of year:
I’ve been really miserable with a cold for three days, and as my COVID test is negative, I need that 5 day Z-pack antibiotic to get better faster.
It really can be miserable suffering from cold symptoms. Ninety eight percent of the time these symptoms are due to a viral infection and since your rapid RSV and influenza nasal swab tests are also negative today, your illness should resolve over the next few days without you needing a prescription medication.
But I can’t breathe and I can’t sleep.
You can use salt water rinses and a few days of decongestant nose spray to ease the congestion.
But my face feels like there is a blown up balloon inside.
Try applying a warm towel to your face – the heat will help improve circulation in your sinuses and ease your discomfort.When it cools off, warm it up again – basically rinse and repeat.
And I’m feverish and having sweats at night.
Your temp today is 99.2 so not a concern. You can use ibuprofen or acetominophen to help the feverish feeling.
But my snot is green.
That’s not unusual with viral upper respiratory infections and not necessarily an indicator of a bacterial infection.
And my teeth are starting to hurt and my ears are popping.
Let me know if that is not resolving over the next few days.
But I’m starting to cough.
Your lungs are clear today so it is likely from post nasal drainage irritating your upper airway. Best way to help that is to breathe steam to keep your bronchial tubes moist, push fluids and prop up with an extra pillow.
But sometimes I cough to the point of gagging. Isn’t whooping cough going around?
Your illness doesn’t fit the typical timeline for pertussis. You can consider using an over the counter cough suppressant if needed.
But I always end up needing antibiotics. This is just like my regular sinus infection thing I get every year.
There’s plenty of evidence antibiotics can do more harm than good, eliminating healthy bacteria in your gut. They really aren’t indicated at this point in your illness and could have nasty side effects.
But I always get better faster with antibiotics. Doctors always give me antibiotics.
Studies show that two weeks later there is no significant difference in symptoms between those treated with antibiotics and those who did self-care without them.
But I have a really hard week coming up and my whole family is sick and I won’t be able to rest.
This could be your body’s way of saying that you need to take the time you need to recover – is there someone who can help pick up the load your carry?
But I just waited an hour to see you.
I really am sorry about the wait; we’re seeing a lot of sick people with so much viral illness going around and needing to test to rule out COVID and influenza.
But I paid a $20 co-pay today for this visit.
We’re very appreciative of you paying so promptly on the day of service.
But I can go down the street to the urgent care clinic or do one of those telehealth doctor visits and for $210 they will write me an antibiotic prescription without making me feel guilty for asking.
I wouldn’t recommend taking unnecessary medication that can lead to bacterial resistance, side effects and allergic reactions. I truly believe you can be spared the expense, inconvenience and potential risk of taking something you don’t really need.
So that’s it? Salt water rinses, warm towels on my face and just wait it out? That’s all you can offer?
Let me know if your symptoms are unresolved or worsening over the next few days.
So you spent all that time in school just to tell people they don’t need medicine?
I believe I can help most people heal themselves with self-care at home. I try to educate my patients about when they do need medicine and then facilitate appropriate treatment. Also, I want to thank you for wearing your mask today to reduce the chance of transmitting your virus to those around you.
I’m going to go find a real doctor who will actually listen to me and give me what I need.
It certainly is a choice you can make. A real doctor vows to first do no harm while always listening to what you think, what your physical examination shows, then takes into account what evidence-based clinical data says is the best and safest course of action. I realize you want something other than what I’m offering you today. If you are feeling worse over the next few days or develop new symptoms, please let me know so we can reevaluate how best to treat you.
I’ll bet you’ll tell me next you want me to get one of those COVID vaccines too, won’t you?
Actually, I prefer you be feeling a bit better before you receive both the COVID and influenza vaccines. That would offer extra immunity protection for you through the next few months. Shall we schedule you for a time for your vaccination updates next week?Remember, I’m still here if you need to review your options again…
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Yesterday our children, playing in a tree, watched as the tiniest bird fell from above them, where it belonged, to land below them, where it did not. The dog, animal and eager, stepped on the bird, then lowered his head. Our daughter screamed, hauled him back, then cupped her trembling hands around the trembling bird, Its one wing stretched and bent. Our son ran inside, obedient to our daughter’s instructions. I was in the shower, useless. You found a shoebox, sheltered the bird, helped our children find leaves and twigs, perched the box in the tree. At supper, we prayed for the bird while its mother visited the shoebox, her beak full. She fretted and fluttered. She couldn’t do anything, and we couldn’t do anything, and after supper, we found the trowel. Dust to dust, I said. O how I longed to gather you, you said, as a mother hen gathers her young beneath her wings. Our son pushed a stick into the soft earth. Our daughter told him not to push too far. ~Shea Tuttle “After reading our daughter’s poem”from Image Journal
Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me. ~Emily Dickinson
I have known the helplessness of watching life ebb away from a living creature and not be able to do a thing to change what is happening.
As a teenage nurse aide in a rest home for the elderly, I saw much of dying over those years before going to medical school – some deaths were anticipated and some unexpected. What was most apparent to me in that setting is that my primary role was to be a caring witness and comforter. I could not change what was happening but I could be there, not leaving my patients to die alone. I hoped that I was useful in some way.
Later, when I worked as a physician in a hospital, there were certainly things we would do to respond to a sudden cardiac event, and it was very dramatic to see someone’s pulse restored and stabilized due to our intervention. But more often than not, what we could do wouldn’t change the reality – dying still happened and we were gathered to witness the end. We often left the bedside feeling useless.
Now I have grandchildren who are learning about death through observing the natural cycles of animals living and dying on our farm. They discover a dead bird or vole on the ground; they were aware one of our elderly horses recently died. They are aware our beloved farm dogs are aging and so are grandma and grandpa.
Children naturally ask “why?” and we do our best to explain there is always hope and comfort, even when physical bodies are dust in the ground, marked by a stick or stone or only a memory.
It is “Hope” that sings alive within us, even when we’re naked and featherless, even if we fall far from the nest we were born to. We are caught and safe under our Savior’s wings for the rest of eternity, never to be “just dust” again.
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Instead of depression, try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave. ~Andrea Gibson “Instead of Depression” from You Better Be Lightning
We didn’t say fireflies but lightning bugs. We didn’t say carousel but merry-go-round. Not seesaw, teeter-totter not lollipop, sucker. We didn’t say pasta, but spaghetti, macaroni, noodles: the three kinds. We didn’t get angry: we got mad. And we never felt depressed dismayed, disappointed disheartened, discouraged disillusioned or anything, even unhappy: just sad. ~Sally Fisher “Where I Come From” from Good Question.
…if you could distinguish finer meanings within “Awesome” (happy, content, thrilled, relaxed, joyful, hopeful, inspired, prideful, adoring, grateful, blissful.. .), and fifty shades of “Crappy” (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy.. .), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion, providing you with the tools for more flexible and functional responses. ~Lisa Feldman Barrett from How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others…. We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole being. That is healing. — Henri Nouwen from Bread for the Journey
If there is anything I came to understand over the decades I served as a primary care physician, it is that every person experiences painful emotions that make them miserable, making it even more difficult to share with others. Sometimes those feelings build up such pressure that they leak out of our cells as physical symptoms: headaches, muscle tightness, stomach upset, hypertension. Other times they are so overwhelming we can no longer function in a day to day way – described clinically as rage, panic, mood disorder, depression, self-destructive, suicidal.
Somehow we’ve lost permission to be sad. Just sad. Sometimes unbearably, hopelessly sad.
Sadness happens to us all, some longer than others, some worse than others, some deeper than others. What makes sadness more real and more manageable is if we can say it out loud — whatever ‘sad’ means to us on a given day and if we describe our feelings in detail, explaining to others who can understand because they’ve been there too, then they can listen and help.
Painful emotions don’t always need a “fix” in the short term, particularly chemical, but that is why I was usually consulted. Alcohol, marijuana and other self-administered drugs tend to be the temporary anesthesia that people seek to stop feeling anything at all but it can erupt even stronger later.
Sometimes an overwhelming feeling just needs an outlet so it no longer is locked up, unspoken and silent, threatening to leak out in ways that tear us up and pull us apart.
Sometimes we need a healing respite/hibernation, with permission to sleep through the world’s alarms for a time. At times, medical management with antidepressants can be incredibly helpful along with talk therapy.
It helps to find words to express how things felt before this sadness, where you are now in the midst of it and where you wish you could be rather than being swallowed by sorrow. Healing takes time and like anything else that is broken, it hurts as it repairs. Armed with that self-knowledge and some gentle compassion, tomorrow and the next day and the next might feel a little less hopeless and overwhelming.
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I was still a kid interning at State he reminisces late in the meal— It was a young red-headed woman looked like my sister when the lines went flat I fell apart shook like a car with a broken axle Went to the head surgeon a fatherly man Boy, he said, you got to fill a graveyard before you know this business and you just did row one, plot one. ~Alicia Suskin Ostriker, “The Surgeon” from The Book of Seventy
As a physician-in-training in the late 1970’s, I rotated among a variety of inner city public hospitals, learning clinical skills on patients who were grateful to have someone, anyone, care enough to take care of them. There were plenty of homeless street people who needed to be deloused before the “real” doctors would touch them, and there were the alcoholic diabetics whose gangrenous toes would self-amputate as I removed stinking socks. There were people with gun shot wounds and stabbings who had police officers posted at their doors and rape victims who were beaten and poisoned into submission and silence. Someone needed to touch them with compassion when their need was greatest.
As a 25 year old idealistic and naive student, I truly believed I could make a difference in the 6 weeks I spent in any particular hospital rotation. That proved far too grandiose and unrealistic, yet there were times I did make a difference, sometimes not so positive, in the few minutes I spent with a patient. As part of the training process, mistakes were inevitable. Lungs collapsed when putting in central lines, medications administered caused anaphylactic shock, pain and bleeding caused by spinal taps–each error creates a memory that never will allow such a mistake to occur again. It is the price of training a new doctor and the patient always–always– pays the price.
I was finishing my last on-call night on my obstetrical rotation at a large military hospital that served an army base. The hospital, built during WWII was a series of far flung one story bunker buildings connected by miles of hallways–if one part were bombed, the rest of the hospital could still function. The wing that contained the delivery rooms was factory medicine at its finest: a large ward of 20 beds for laboring and 5 delivery rooms which were often busy all at once, at all hours. Some laboring mothers were married girls in their mid-teens whose husbands were stationed in the northwest, transplanting their young wives thousands of miles from their families and support systems. Their bittersweet labors haunted me: children delivering babies they had no idea how to begin to parent.
I had delivered 99 babies during my 6 week rotation. My supervising residents and the nurses on shift had kept me busy on that last day trying to get me to the *100th* delivery as a point of pride and bragging rights; I had already followed and delivered 4 women that night and had fallen exhausted into bed in the on call-room at 3 AM with no women currently in labor, hoping for two hours of sleep before getting up for morning rounds. Whether I reached the elusive *100* was immaterial to me at that moment.
I was shaken awake at 4:30 AM by a nurse saying I was needed right away. An 18 year old woman had arrived in labor only 30 minutes before and though it was her first baby, she was already pushing and ready to deliver. My 100th had arrived. The delivery room lights were blinding; I was barely coherent when I greeted this almost-mother and father as she pushed, with the baby’s head crowning. The nurses were bustling about doing all the preparation for the delivery: setting up the heat lamps over the bassinet, getting the specimen pan for the placenta, readying suture materials for the episiotomy.
I noticed there were no actual doctors in the room so asked where the resident on call was.
What? Still in bed? Time to get him up! Delivery was imminent.
I knew the drill. Gown up, gloves on, sit between her propped up legs, stretch the vulva around the crowning head, thinning and stretching it with massaging fingers to try to avoid tears. I injected anesthetic into the perineum and with scissors cut the episiotomy to allow more room, a truly unnecessary but, at the time, standard procedure in all too many deliveries. Amniotic fluid and blood dribbled out then splashed on my shoes and the sweet salty smell permeated everything. I was concentrating so hard on doing every step correctly, I didn’t think to notice whether the baby’s heart beat had been monitored with the doppler, or whether a resident had come into the room yet or not. The head crowned, and as I sucked out the baby’s mouth, I thought its face color looked dusky, so checked quickly for a cord around the neck, thinking it may be tight and compromising. No cord found, so the next push brought the baby out into my lap. Bluish purple, floppy, and not responding. I quickly clamped and cut the cord and rubbed the baby vigorously with a towel.
Nothing, no response, no movement, no breath. Nothing. I rubbed harder.
A nurse swept in and grabbed the baby and ran over to the pediatric heat lamp and bed and started resuscitation.
Chaos ensued. The mother and father began to panic and cry, the pediatric and obstetrical residents came running, hair askew, eyes still sleepy, but suddenly shocked awake with the sight of a blue floppy baby.
I sat stunned, immobilized by what had just happened in the previous five minutes. I tried to review in my foggy mind what had gone wrong and realized at no time had I heard this baby’s heart beat from the time I entered the room. The nurses started answering questions fired at me by the residents, and no one could remember listening to the baby after the first check when they had arrived in active pushing labor some 30 minutes earlier. The heart beat was fine then, and because things happened so quickly, it had not been checked again. It was not an excuse, and it was not acceptable. It was a terrible terrible error. This baby had died sometime in the previous half hour. It was not apparent why until the placenta delivered in a rush of blood and it was obvious it had partially abrupted–prematurely separated from the uterine wall so the circulation to the baby had been compromised. Potentially, with continuous fetal monitoring, this would have been detected and the baby delivered in an emergency C section in time. Or perhaps not. The pediatric resident worked for another 20 minutes on the little lifeless baby.
The parents held each other, sobbing, while I sewed up the episiotomy. I had no idea what to say, mortified and helpless as a witness and perpetrator of such agony. I tried saying I was so sorry, so sad they lost their baby, felt so badly we had not known sooner. There was nothing that could possibly comfort them or relieve their horrible loss or the freshness of their raw grief.
And of course, there were no words of comfort for my own anguish.
Later, in another room, my supervising resident made me practice intubating the limp little body so I’d know how to do it on something other than a mannequin. I couldn’t see the vocal cords through my tears but did what I was told, as I always did.
I cried in the bathroom, a sad exhausted selfish weeping. Instead of achieving that “perfect” 100, I learned something far more important: without constant vigilance, and even with it, tragedy intervenes in life unexpectedly without regard to age or status or wishes or desires. I went on as a family physician to deliver a few hundred babies during my career, never forgetting the baby that might have had a chance, if only born at a hospital with adequately trained well rested staff without a med student trying to reach a meaningless goal.
This baby would now be in his 40’s, likely with children of his own, his parents now proud and loving grandparents.
I wonder if I’ll meet him again — this little soul only a few minutes away from a full life — if I’m ever forgiven enough to share a piece of heaven with humanity’s millions of unborn babies who, through intention or negligence, never had opportunity to draw a breath.
Then, just maybe then, forgiveness will feel real and grace will flood the terrible void where, not for the first time nor the last, my guilt overwhelmed what innocence I had left.
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It’s the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; the gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. ~Wendell Berry “Goods”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
It seems unlikely anyone would say I didn’t work hard enough all those years. After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses and I know it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.
Even so, I know I could have done more all those years.
I could have thrown myself more fully into the pull on the tugs, could have shouldered the yoke with more enthusiasm, could have bent down low with unbroken determination.
You might say somewhere I lost the gayety in my stride, and you would be right — I ended up trudging through my day, bruised from running into too many submerged rocks, bumping into immoveable tree stumps and tripping on hidden roots, falling into deep furrows of long and lonely post-midnight hours.
You might even say eventually the knowledge of a job well-done seemed to lay deeper than my plow could ever reach.
When it came time for me to shrug out of the yoke and shake off the harness, I knew others die in their harness, never to rest easy on this earth.
I am unsure what to do next with the seasons I have left. Even so, I love the wondering and wandering, almost as much as I love the feel of the sun on my unyoked withers.
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
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Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim Of twilight stares along the quiet weald, And the kind, simple country shines revealed In solitudes of peace, no longer dim. The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light, Then stretches down his head to crop the green. All things that he has loved are in his sight; The places where his happiness has been Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good. ~Siegfried Sassoon from “Break of Day”
We grow older along with our horses – as we near seventy, our oldest mare is thirty years old. None of us, horses or humans, have to climb in the harness to pull the heavy loads of our former work lives.
During these October days, as the horses feel the morning sun on their withers and the green blades under their feet, they scan the pasture for the sweetest tender patch to munch in the fields they know and love so well. They nap more now than in their younger years, taking breaks to let their heads hang relaxed and nodding, their tails slowly swishing at flies.
To be honest, I nap and nod more now as well.
They remind me to borrow the calm of the pasture to balance the noise and misery always present in the morning headlines. Carrying that calm to my decades of work as a physician was an essential survival skill. I remembered how peace and light intentionally descended to a troubled earth in sore need of healing.
A new day’s sunlight breaks fresh each morning and sinks gently and quietly beneath the horizon each evening. All things I love are within my sight; happiness and contentment do grow, like the grass beneath my feet, thanks to the Light.
I must go in; the fog is rising… ~Emily Dickinson, her last words
I have watched the dying in their last hours: often through the fog of waning breaths, they see what I cannot, they listen to what I do not hear, stretching their arms overhead as their fingers extend and grasp to touch what is, as yet, far beyond my reach.
I watch and wonder how it is to reverse the journey that brought me here from the fog of my amnion.
The mist of living lifts.
I will enter a place unsurpassed in brilliance and clarity; the mystery of what lies beyond solved only by going in to it, welcomed back to where I started.
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Aspire to decency. Practice civility toward one another. Admire and emulate ethical behavior wherever you find it. Apply a rigid standard of morality to your lives; and if, periodically, you fail as you surely will, adjust your lives, not the standards. ― Ted Koppel
Ten years ago during this week in August, my clinical work was routine and ordinary but took a quick turn when I got a message from the media director at my university that a 14 month old medical opinion article I’d written for the student newspaper and then posted as a regular contributor on www.kevinmd.com was suddenly being quoted on the Huffington Post, Salon.com and other websites.
The original article was written as one in a series of opinion pieces on medical issues pertinent to college students requested by the student newspaper. I wrote it in spring 2011 after draining my umpteenth staph bacteria genital abscess due to the increasingly common practice of cosmetic removal of pubic hair. I felt the students needed to understand the hazards of what they were doing and hoped I could spare the next patient from experiencing an infection so painful and potentially serious.
So it went viral, over a year after it was written, all in a matter of hours. I was being quoted as if I had just been interviewed by these news agencies, which I had not, and they began feeding wrong information to each other: I was identified as “a leading British physician” since the first media report originated in the U.K. One British site actually asked permission to reprint the original article, which I appreciated so that my words could not be taken out of context, but they attached a photo of me to the article lifted from my family picture on my personal blog.
Soon my personal cell phone started to ring in the middle of the night and my email in-box filled up. Messages from Europe, South America and all over the U.S. came in with requests for interviews, wanting me to elaborate in more detail on my very “provocative” point of view. I said no to every one of them even though some were respectable agencies, like the BBC, because I’d said all I had to say on this particular subject. I did not want my long career to be reduced to my defense of pubic hair or my life motto to read “Leave it alone!” Indeed I can hold my head up and be proud to tell my grandchildren someday that I actually turned down the Playboy Channel.
The online comments on the articles rapidly reproduced themselves, numbering in the thousands, with many hostile to my perspective and saying so in the most mean and inflammatory ways possible, citing my age, my looks and obvious lack of sex appeal as showing I lacked credibility in this subject. I dared to question the point of a multi-billion dollar cosmetic industry spawned by the even bigger multi-billion dollar porn industry, and no one was going to let me get away with it unscathed.
Civility has become even more endangered on the internet in the intervening ten years so I believe I actually got off easy at the time. Human beings lack accountability for their words and actions while hiding behind anonymous comments on media websites and blogs. It is easy to attack, lie, threaten, and bully when it is only words on a screen directed at someone you don’t know and will never meet. Decency and civility are lost forever when the standards for moral and ethical behavior disappear in a fog of pixels and bytes.
It has taken some time and distance for me to consider whether I did the right thing writing about a medical issue no one else would touch at the time. The “bare” trend has definitely waned over the last decade yet plenty of people still engage in the practice, although the recent sexual spread of the monkey pox virus is making some think twice about it.
If I managed to convince someone to put away the razor, stop the waxing, and respect their body as nature intended it to be, maybe I did the right thing after all.
After all – I shared whispered words of wisdom: Let it be…
I like to stroll the graveyard in the middle of town With my friend Anne, though we seldom agree On what an epitaph we happen to read implies. I’m inclined to find the one-line gravestone, Dr. Noah Vedder, M.D., as sadly comic. If we can’t take our money into the dark, I read it as saying, at least we can take our titles. But Anne, whose sympathies are aroused More quickly than mine, reads it more darkly As confessional. Here is the man’s admission That he saw himself as a better doctor Than he was a friend, or father, or husband, A better listener in his office than at home.
If his kin were responsible for the inscription, Its terseness, I say, may suggest they were moved More by duty than they were by love. But for her, its terseness seems to imply Their painful acknowledgment that no praise Inscribed on the stone would keep their friend From being forgotten soon after they would be. And behind this truth she hears a protest: If the world were fair, he wouldn’t be sentenced To endless retirement but allowed to practice, In a life beyond this one, the profession he loved.
What use would a doctor be, I ask, in a realm Where bodies are laid aside? But for her the point is That those who knew him were certain that if Such a realm existed and a doctor were called for there, He’d volunteer, glad to hold office hours And glad after hours to visit patients Too sick to leave home, However modest the streets they lived on, However winding and poorly lit. ~Carl Dennis “At the Graveyard with Anne”
Since my people are crushed, I am crushed; I mourn, and horror grips me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no healing for the wound of my people? Jeremiah 8:21-22
We physicians can be an arrogant lot in our devotion to our profession above all else in our lives – I’ve known a few who wear their M.D. title full-time like a banner and shield to prove their expertise.
The only time the label M.D. is relevant is on a name tag in a clinical setting and often it doesn’t even make a difference there. We do what we can with what knowledge we possess from our training, as limited as it is. There is so much that we don’t know and don’t understand.
Even so, there are many altruistic physicians who give of themselves 24 hours a day for their lifetime. Some would gladly continue their healing efforts long after they have become dust, yet those skills are no longer needed. In heaven, all are already healed.
Our healing comes from beyond our expertise, from a balm that can never be prescribed. We have a Great Physician who never forgets us, even when we are crushed and mourning, when all seems hopeless with our wounds so incredibly deep.
We are not forgotten.
Every face is in you, every voice, Every sorrow in you. Every pity, every love, Every memory, woven into fire. Every breath is in you, every cry, Every longing in you.
Every singing, every hope, Every healing, woven into fire. Every heart is in you, Every tongue, every trembling in you, Every blessing, every soul, Every shining, woven into fire. ~Michael Dennis Browne
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