Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-06-06 - 7:42 a.m.

I Hope My Sister Doesn't Read This

My sister is a doctor. And this week, I have had enough of doctors.

When someone you love is in the hospital, you spend a lot of time waiting. And a lot of time thinking. It's a time of dependence on the kindness of strangers and the competency of people you didn't choose.

There are doctors. Lots of them. Some are kind. Some are dismissive. They all know what they're doing, and they all feel (like Microsoft developers) that you don't NEED to know.

They're right. Will my knowing how my father's surgery went have any effect on his recovery? No.

But we're awfully cold and naked, those of us keeping vigil in the surgery waiting room. We have no function, no power, no importance. We have only information to warm ourselves with, and we only have that if you will give it to us.

People, I guess, go into medicine for different reasons. Some perhaps because they want to help people. Some because it's a fascinating science. Because it pays well. Because it gives you a unique power. This man's gall bladder is killing him, but I can stop that. I can give him years of life, all in an hour.

I wonder, do they know the amazing healing power of a hand on a mother or daughter's shoulder in the waiting room? A smile? Anything that lets us know that the craftsman with the knife also has a father, a child, a beloved friend?

Do they know we think they're the best? It's what we say to comfort ourselves: "They say he's the best." They're all the best. At some level we know there are varying levels of competency in doctors, but only other medical people know who is who, and they don't tell. So we all have the best. And what would we judge them on? What information do we have? "Don't go to him - my aunt's friend did, and she died." "He's good - he never makes you wait." Three families in that surgery waiting room, three patients, three different surgeons - but we all had the best. The best is always on call, at our hospital.

Sometimes it's handy, having a sister who is a doctor. Other doctors will talk to her; she's in the Club. I'm not. Then she'll tell me. But when I need to rant about physicians, hers is not the ear I choose. Some blood is thicker than other blood, and the kind spilled on white coats is the thickest of all.

The hospital staff is the front line. There is where you find the reservoir of compassion. Not everywhere; they are people like us, with inadequate paychecks, alcoholic husbands, unsympathetic supervisors, cars that need new tires. But it's there, and some of them give it freely. It was an OR nurse who came to tell me about my father's surgery, and she SAT DOWN with me before speaking to me; she gave me her time, and she told me that her father, too, has Alzheimer's. There was the ICU nurse who offered to show me where my father would be, and smiled at me, and later said, "He's resting well now - maybe you should, too." He knew, somehow, that I needed some sort of permission to go home. There was the radiology tech that took my Dad to and from X-ray, who stopped afterward and took his hand and told him he hoped he would feel better very soon. There was the ICU nurse who told me, "He knows you - there's a different look on his face when he sees you."

For these people and for others, I am grateful. For the doctors, I am alternately grateful and furious. It would take so little, to do so much more.

We forgive them everything, even for being assholes, for telling us nothing, for making it plain that families are merely obstructions. We suck up. We are afraid not to.

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