When doctors get sick

Life has these strange ways of reminding us that it still exists within every fragment of our bodies, and we can't ever get away with not participating in its horrible little games. 

It only takes a single, unexpected text, an hour before an examination to pull you back into reality- which so easily fails to possess weary souls:

'I need u 2 pick Ash up frm school. Dad has been admitted into QMC'

With a lack of response to calls and texts back, we can only spend the next 4 hours convincing ourselves that we never got that message. That we could still remember the Broadbent Filter Model of Attention within the half hour left of this exam, and that we can always be stronger than we feel. Nothing seems real, and the car ride home from school will inevitably be a hopeless, dewy-eyed Pokémon discussion.

Back home, one car may sit unusually complacent on the drive, so that little boys can smile at the sight of it and gush 'Dad's home'. It is difficult to understand what sort of introspections a 7 yr old may have, when 7 years have been and gone where Dads are never home before 7pm. 

When we turn around, and suggest to them that the car has never moved off the drive from morning, there is only something short of a simper and a quick glance back in the vehicle's direction as a response.

An hour or two may pass before someone puts forward the suggestion that an outing to the hospital is a very good idea after tea and biscuits. They drive, they visit, they sit, they exchange a kiss or two and then they leave. Car rides home can be nothing more than creative silence.

On arriving, we may sit out in the dusk with a face wet from silent tears, and tremble, holding the hopelessly brave, while they cry indecipherability onto the lapel of an equally affected other. 

But we can see our luck, when it is reflected on the windows in the front porch, showing the difference that lies between losing something, and being reminded of how much there is to lose.  

The patient can only be grateful for the luck that is felt through the endoscopic instruments reaching down their throats, sourcing the pain. There's a sweet familiarity to these techniques; the imaging, the precision, the countless research meetings, the computer, purging with clips of the convoluting gastrointestinal tracts. There's a pain that they get used to making a living out of in starch white coats, that they never imagine could plant itself in seemingly capable bodies. And seeing their colleagues look on, diagnose and discuss, while their own body has shown the signs of disintegration, is enough to shake them all into the reality that provides their bread and butter. The reality that they will all be in someday, lying on the white beds, breathing the white air and hoping that they will be cared for by someone as competent as themselves.