MAR 06-8

INDEXING TITLE: JPINGUL’S Medical Anecdotal Report [6-08]
TITLE: One Day at a Time
PERIOD OF MEDICAL OBSERVATION: October 15, 2006

My patients taught me about courage, about bravery, about organizing for a cause, about dying for one. . . .

We became zealots for the cause of our patients, even if zeal was all we had to give. We had no cure to offer, and so we began to leave the thresholds of our medical-industrial complexes and visit our patients in their homes, at their deathbeds. Paradoxically we discovered that our presence, our promise not to desert our patients, our continued care brought about a sort of healing, by which I mean helping the patients come to terms with their illness, with their deaths, and meanwhile diminishing for them the sense of spiritual violation that any serious disease brings, none more than this one.

I watched with awe as politics eclipsed science and as gay activists rattled the cages of stodgy government entities like the Food and Drug Administration, and got results.

Today I see so many of us who came of age at the same time now have one foot in voluntary work, as if we need the kind of challenge. It is as if we have carried the lessons of the cancer support group, to prove that one can make a difference even in a poor country, one can find ways to make an impact in the life if the patient, no matter how seemingly insignificant it may be.

On my desk I keep a picture sent to me by a friend, a doctor who has spent his professional years in Ethiopia. It shows a beautiful, chubby-cheeked Ethiopian child, wearing colorful local dress, and holding in his hand a photograph of a scrawny skeleton in rags. The photograph is of his former self, taken a few months before he got the H.I.V. medications that Rick scrounged money to buy. Victories are now to be won in that fashion, one child at a time.

I think perhaps that is the legacy of my patients, the legacy of the nurses and physicians and social workers who taught me so much, the legacy of people from all walks of life who toiled against cancer when there was no hope. My students seem to know what we had to so painfully learn: the secret in the care of the patient is caring for the patient.