musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end


Although I am old now, and should know better, I still have not figured out loneliness. It is not avoided, as I once assumed, by having a lot of friends, or things to occupy my time; it is not so easily definable. As St. Augustine was said to have observed when asked about Time: If no one asks, I think I know, but if someone asks me to explain it, I cannot.

Some things seem to fly undetected under the radar only to surprise us when they arrive. Elders are expected to greet this with resilience -answers, I suppose; years of experience are expected to have solved the problems. At least, that’s what I think Mary hoped. She had been a student a few years ago when I had been asked to give a lecture to a class of nursing students nearing graduation. I’m not sure why I had been chosen, although I suspect the other doctor who usually taught them was ill or something. I don’t even remember the topic I had been asked to address, but I have little doubt that I wandered away from the assigned subject matter as usual, because nobody looked like they were taking notes -nobody except one young student who seemed to find my digressions interesting. That student, I later discovered, was Mary, and she ended up working as a nurse-midwife in my obstetrical unit in the hospital.

Of course, I’d like to think that the lecture I’d given that time had something to do with her career choice, but more likely she had always found obstetrics interesting. Apparently I had talked to the class about empathy and trying to make an effort to understand what their patient was going through; why it was so important to feel that their midwife was sharing in their experience.  As a male obstetrician, lecturing about the feelings of women in childbirth, I remember there were more than a few eyes rolling in the back seats of the classroom. But, of course, those were different times.

Mary left our obstetrical unit after three or four years, though. She said she wanted to work overseas -Africa, or maybe Asia, I think, but at any rate, some place where the need was greater; some place where she could feel she was actually contributing something. But that must have been over ten years ago and since my retirement, I have to admit that I forgot all about her. Then, a month or so ago, out of the blue I received an Email from her. She was apparently back from her travels for a short while, and wondered if she could meet me for coffee. She had heard that I had retired and figured I might have some time now to talk with her.

I was flattered, of course, and more than a little curious about what she had been doing, so I immediately agreed to see her in town. She’d chosen a quiet little coffee shop on the north shore of the Burrard Inlet; that made me think she really did want to talk about something important.

It was a sunny day in late autumn when we met and she’d found a cosy corner on the patio where we could see the ocean.

After a brief hug and reminiscing for a while, her face turned serious. “I needed to talk to somebody, doctor…”

“G,” I interrupted. “Everybody calls me G now…”

She smiled and relaxed more comfortably in her seat. I think she was hoping we could talk as equals. “I knew you would insist on that…G” -I could tell that using my nickname was difficult for her- “It’s one of the reasons I felt I could talk to you.”

I smiled and nibbled on my doughnut.

She stared at the ocean sparkling in the near distance for a moment, and then, after a quick taste of her bagel, sighed. “I’ve been away for so long now, I was really looking forward to my trip home… Only, it doesn’t really feel like ‘home’ anymore,” she added, searching my face for reassurance that she wasn’t being silly. “I mean my friends are still here, and they all seemed glad to see me and everything…” She toyed with her cup for a moment. “We talk and share our memories and they ask me what it was like to work in some of the refugee camps, but…” She sent her eyes seaward again, uncertain how to proceed.
I had a sip of my coffee but stayed silent.

“I mean, they say they understand what it must have been like there; they knew how much the work meant to me… means to me that is; my best friend -the one who knows me better than anybody- tried really hard to understand how I must have felt… feel to be working there…” She felt she had to keep correcting the tense of her words. “But…” She suddenly sent her eyes to sit on my cheeks as if they were investigating whether it was a safe place to perch.

I smiled reassuringly and waited for her to decide if she should continue.

“But although she knows me…” she hesitated again. “…She doesn’t anymore.” Her eyes pleaded with me to listen. “She seems to understand… but it’s like… like she’s watching me on the screen from a seat in a movie theatre.” She sighed again and had another sip of her lukewarm coffee. “She thinks she understands me, but she hasn’t lived it like I have. She knows that the plight of the poor and the dispossessed is important to me, and yet somehow, even though she understands the story, and recognizes what the character in the movie feels, in the end it’s happening to somebody else, after all.”

She shrugged at the difficulty of trying to explain what she meant. “I don’t know what to do, G. My friends mean well, and I love them, but…”

She stopped talking and turned her head to look out at the growing whitecaps in the almost-distant sea.

The wind was increasing, even on the patio where we sat, and a few dark clouds were visible out towards the Georgia Straight. Then she let her eyes rest on me again. “But they don’t really know me anymore. It’s like part of me has come back as a different person, and I sometimes feel -I don’t know… lonely or something.”

She began to put her coat on again, although I wasn’t sure if it was because of the increasing wind. “The way you used to talk to your patients on the ward, G -the way you talked to us in that lecture you gave our class so many years ago… I mean, a male Ob/Gyn talking about trying to understand his female patients, and ending up by simply listening seriously to complaints he had no way of ever experiencing…

“But on the ward, I remember you showing that no matter the difficulty, no matter the obvious gender gap, you actually cared and took it seriously, although your female colleagues had the luxury of discounting the problem. You know, like ‘Suck it up woman, we all go through this…’ You couldn’t say that -you wouldn’t say that, and it had a profound effect on me.” She was silent as she buttoned up her coat. “I’ve wanted to tell you how much you influenced me for a long time…”

It was my turn to sigh. “Thank you for that Mary; it means a lot to me… But I wish I could help you to feel better now that you’re back here…”

She smiled and stood up, then walked around the table and hugged me. “You already have, G… You already have.”

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