Tag Archives: grief

What I Have Been Doing With Your Donated (and Undonated) Monies

By Posted in Life, Running, Travel, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Late Training Notes from the Bristol Downs.

I promised to report on your Unusual Investment. (If, as you read this, you don’t know about that Investment, please visit these links http://hopkintonrespite.com or
http://www.youtube.com/user/HopkintonRespiteTV
It is not too late for your dollars to join the nearly-four thousand dollars that preceded yours, whose donor investors will never see them again.)
Since I first wrote to you the grass has not grown beneath my feet. A certain amount of tinea has, but this is inevitable: I have been training hard. The Boston Marathon will be run on Monday 15 April and investors in my little Scheme are helping the Michael Lisson Memorial Respite Centre.
Michael’s mother, who created the Centre, wrote one week ago, reminding me that Michael died on the day of the 100th running. I ran that day, unknowing. Now I know and marathon running feels like a small matter.

They ought to call the Downs the Ups, these vast, everlasting, uptwisting hills. Or the Steeps. From one end of the Downs you can’t see the other for distance. And even if you could, you couldn’t – because of the mists. In spring, season of mists and frosts.

My father, not a lewd man nor crude, told few risqué jokes. However this semi-liquid air brings to mind one of Dad’s one-liners: Did you hear about the man who took his girlfriend out into the night air and mist?

Enough complaining. Hilly Bristol, like coastal Israel, is terrific training ground for Monday’s Boston Marathon. We’ll run up the Newton Hills between miles 18 and 21, hills famous for breaking hearts, but the Bristol Ups, like the long, high dunes of Herzliyah, have toughened mine.

This is my race preview. I have trained long and hard, six days a week, resting only on the Sabbath. Each run feels easier than the last. Gone is the sense of labour in a run of a mere hour’s duration. My legs feel wonderful, muscular and light. There is the little matter of the creaking discomfort in the left knee – my good knee – a new sensation. The knee hurts only when it bears weight. Best ignored.

With the exception of a 3.5 hour run in the Jerusalem Forest all my training runs have been solitary. This is not of my choosing: running with a friend is four times easier than running alone. This is true for all runs, over all distances. I know: I have done the maths. However all my friends have stopped running; they have heard the call and they have gone inside for dinner or for breakfast or to their homework or to dull duty. So I run alone.

In Bristol Alfred Lord Tennyson has kept me company. Some fluke or inadvertence has selected the poems of Tennyson on my i-phone. Useless here in the UK for telephony, my i-phone has become the perfect companion. Deaf and mute to the world outside my earbuds, my Apple sings the songs of my choosing, or in this case, the poems of my non-choosing.

He was keen on death, was Lord Alfred. From ‘Ulysses’, where he found romantic allure in Death, the Adventure; to the dying of King Arthur; to the demise of the Lady of Shallott; through lyric after lyric, the Laureate spoke to me, morning after morning, of death. Last Sunday he spoke to me at great length of the loss of his friend Arthur Hallam.
Endless his grieving, dark his spirits, Tennyson’s mood finds its echoes on these misty Downs.

That day found me running near the railing that kept me from stepping out into air and falling hundreds of feet in near-dark to the river, tirra lira, below. A blaze of red in the gloom, patches of white at shoulder height; what are these? A brief breather is permitted. The patches of white turn out to be cards, handwritten by members of a local junior cricket team and a junior football team, in memoriam to a teammate. The blaze of red is a football club scarf inscribed in black marking pen: Russell Simmons # 14.
Fresh posies of daffodil and another, paler flower, bloom from the railings.

No-one else in sight. No-one to ask or tell. No-one else to lament. My head bends, defeated. A sudden roar, a cry of raw sorrow bursts from my throat. My voice thickens, my eyes are wet.

Running is an easy thing, marathon training now trivial.

Shaking my head, shaking it to shed reality, I look up once more. There are more words to be read on that blood-red scarf: You’ll never walk alone.

Postscript: Afterwards I Googled Russell Simmons, deceased Bristol sportsman, and felt still sadder.

Copyright, Howard Goldenberg, 10 April, 2013

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Doctor and Suer

By Posted in Life, Medical, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I ate breakfast with a sixty-year old doctor who told me he’d retired from doctoring. He is a paediatrician, a member of that special tribe of doctors whose hallmark is kindness.

I congratulated him on his courage. It takes courage to walk away from a mistress as beautiful – or as possessive – as Medicine.

‘Oh no, I wasn’t brave; the opposite. I was sued.’

‘Really?’

Why was I surprised? Even in his quiet state of Tasmania we Aussies follow America in so much.

I wondered what he’d done.

‘Nothing. I wasn’t accused of doing anything wrong. That was the problem: rather I was accused of not doing something right; I didn’t detect a cancer that was diagnosed years later. By the time the cancer was found it had spread and could not be cured.’

My friend told me the story: how the woman consulted him for breastfeeding advice when her new baby was four days old for breast pain that went away over the following week. Two years later an aggressive breast cancer was discovered.

The woman visited my friend only once. By the time the case came to court the unfortunate patient had no memory of my friend.

America’s doyenne of breast feeding, a distinguished doctor, still acute in her nineties, travelled to testify what any doctor – or any mother – would know: breast pain is universal in the early days of lactation; that transient soreness of that sort is not caused by cancer but by engorgement; and when engorgement settles the pain disappeared. That is what happened in this case too; the eventual cancer was permanent but its supposed symptom was temporary.

This did not deter the counsel for the plaintiff from bullying my friend and decrying his knowledge and skill. In open court, on the public record.

The jury found for the doctor. He was exonerated. And, following two years of legal proceedings in which he lost sleep, lost weight and felt shame, he decided to stop seeing patients. ‘If I can be sued for practising properly, then I can never feel safe. I could be humiliated and publicly insulted in that way at any turn.’

A family with two small children will lose a mother. That mother will suffer and die. My friend loses his good name. A community loses the service of a person who turned his back on Medicine’s monied paths to work humbly for children. How many children of the future will never know his wisdom and skill? How many mothers might have found comfort in his counsel?

I marvelled that this person of exemplary quietude could be shamed publicly. I marvelled at the shamelessness of that lawyer, operating for a contingency fee. In pursuit of mere money that lawyer sought to take from my friend his good name. Now the lawyer has lodged notice of appeal. More grief, more tension for the accidental doctor, the human who helped another human in the elemental enterprise of physical mothering.

More tension and uncertainty, more grief for the mother who will die.

I attended a tribunal hearing once of a different type. Here there was no suit for damages. Instead the licensing authority heard an accusation against an older doctor by a patient that he’d carried out an improper examination of her chest.

The tribunal – consisting of two doctors (one female), a former police detective and a social worker – heard the patient’s evidence in a closed room. The woman was allowed the presence of a support person. The doctor and his support person were excluded. As a result the complainant was given an opportunity to present intimate evidence before a small number of persons who questioned her with respect and tact.

The lady and her supporter were then excused and shown to a private room to await the outcome.

Subsequently the doctor was called on to explain himself before that same nuclear group. He detailed a systematic mode of examination which was thorough, an examination he was taught at his medical school in the days when doctoring was painstaking and x-rays were a late resort. It transpired the patient had never before been examined with such thoroughness. She felt it improper.

The older doctor had practised in this manner for sixty-five years without any complaint against him. He took quiet pride in his meticulous methods. He knew no other way. And now those virtues had found him out.

I imagined the woman had to summon her courage and her resolve to make her complaint. But in the course of these proceedings she was not made to feel that she was on trial for her own truthfulness.

The panel – comprised of doctors and non-doctors – exonerated the doctor. The female chair said the panel found his work exemplary. She added, ‘This tribunal wishes you many more years of such careful practice.’ She then excused the doctor.

After the doctor’s departure from the premises the complainant was recalled. The tribunal explained that no finding was made against the doctor’s practice nor against the patient’s truthfulness.

Here again two innocent persons endured painful proceedings, but neither was humiliated in open court. A careful enquiry was conducted, uncontaminated by lure of money; here there was no blood sport.