A complete recovery

Patrick Sullivan

Doctors (and anyone who works in health care or helping professions, in their own way too) have to reach some sort of truce with the nature of their work; being good-hearted aspirants to the profession, there is the idea that they will alleviate suffering. And they do, sometimes, in some ways. But it does not take long in the clinic to recognize that it is a perpetual presence, too; whether it is a hemoglobin A_1c level that seems as though it will never come down, or a person who just cannot get on the right track, or a stealthy pancreatic cancer, there are always the problems we cannot solve that must be accepted. We all find in our own way the right balance between continuing to work against suffering, against disease, and reconciling ourselves to their presence—as we must, if we are to maintain ourselves as we spend our lives in medicine. And, to extents more and less obvious, suffering provides our motivation and our purpose as doctors: financial, intellectual, existential. This poem is an exploration of a thought experiment: what would it be like for doctors if one day everyone just got better?

Then one day no helicopters
Then one day no helicopters
floated in to land on hospitals’ roofs.
The emergency rooms were quiet
as churches, their staffs sat
in circles munching chips,
playing Scrabble.
The internal medicine and surgical teams
on their morning rounds
discharged the wards entirely,
debated the pathophysiology of
this exodus unprecedented.
All of my patients in clinic that day
were sent off with reassurances I gave wholeheartedly,
no creeping suspicions unspoken.
All the lab results flipped through,
all the imaging unremarkable,
quietly filed.
Some of the doctors were bored: the wranglers’ foe strangely staunched.
Some unbelieving scrounged the city centres, the farms, the ski slopes.
Some called brokers, talked portfolios, transitions.
Some Facebook posted Finally!!! :) then
paused, waited unweighted and
uncertain in this innocence
clerkship consumed.