Apollo managed to combine a dual career as the Greek god of both poetry and medicine. Copernicus, Maimonides, Bulgakov and Chekhov were all physicians who purloined their patients’ narratives. The list of physician-writers through the ages is long and I consider myself privileged to be amongst such esteemed company. Every patient holds the gift of a story.
Silent Night is about a life-changing gift I received early in my career. Many years ago, when I was a junior doctor rostered on for Christmas Eve in a children’s cancer ward, I was up all night attending to a dying child. When I went to reposition his drip, he stared into my eyes and asked if it was going to hurt. I brushed off his question, mumbling ‘No’. After a moment’s silence, he said: ‘Don’t lie to me.’ With these words, his small voice broke through all the well-padded defences I had built up during my training.
After six years as a medical student, practising rectal examinations on old men who had become paralysed following a stroke, performing bone marrow biopsies on dying little old ladies, and shoving needles into the spines of crying babies, I emerged almost totally desensitised to human pain and suffering. My fortnightly salary cheques were based on the fact that other people fell ill, or died. And as a cocky young intern, walking proudly through the wards of a large teaching hospital wearing my long, white coat, I felt impermeable.
That dying child brought me back to life. The cure for my own ‘tunnel vision of the soul’ came gradually. I started reading literature again, which coaxed me to return to writing, something I hadn’t done since high school. With my trembling pen, I began healing my own wounds, trying to make some sort of sense of what I had experienced as a young doctor and as a human being.
My medicine has always fed and informed my writing. But more importantly, my writing has hopefully made me a better doctor. Becoming a writer has opened my eyes so that I am able to see my patients as human beings, each one with their very own story to tell. And nowadays I hope that I am able to listen to their hearts – with both my stethoscope and pen poised.
Editor’s note: Leah has just been appointed to edit a forthcoming anthology of writings – fiction and non-fiction – by well-known physician-writers. It will be published internationally in late 2010 by Scribe Publications. Mazal Tov Leah!
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