I am a lawyer.
Never did I have a desire to study medicine, and the more I liaise with doctors the more I realise why.
The doctor with whom I have the greatest rapport is Dr. Ford. They’re not the one who told me what’s going to happen over the next few months or years. This one is my oncologist. One of the ones that was ‘referred’ to me after I was somewhat aware of what was going on.
Dr. Ford was happy to be blunt. Any questions I or my wife had for them was always answered honestly and without compassion. I appreciated it, even if my wife was confronted by the medical brutality. We needed to hear such things, anyhow, so in the end she came to accept why I returned to this doctor above the others. That, and they are the most knowledgeable in my particular case of cancer.
I’d always thought proper, hospital doctors wore white lab coats and carried clip boards. Dr. Ford was always in neat-casual, often jeans and a shirt. They would often wear nicer, drearier colours whenever they had bad news to give. I wondered if they worried that brighter clothes would imply happiness, that they were excited by the prospect of telling me that this-or-that didn’t work and that I had this-or-that time less than I thought I did. Inconclusive was a common word to hear when they walked into the office wearing a grey or black shirt. Worse still was when the lab coat eventually did show up, but that’s another story.
The markings of a good doctor appeared to be how personable they are. By that criterium, Dr. Ford is quite pitiful. That’s what makes them so wondrous; they give me the shit that I wanted from all the other bastards. I always leave their room feeling like this situation is both out of my control and entirely my fault, and while it always pains Mary it fills me with a ferocious desire to fix it, or to end it now.
And some how, those great feelings of depression or determination or responsibility or anger are what keeps me going, even if it’s as a well of emotion that is threatening to explode every second. It’s better than being a well of nothing, so I’m always happy to visit Dr. Ford. Apprehensive, too, I guess. But happy.
Afterthoughts: