I was the designated driver for the wedding in Connecticut. It was 1991. One of my passengers was a fellow reporter at the newspaper in Albany, N.Y. The other was a friend of the bride and groom who made me think of Alexander Pope. The name of his diagnosis I don’t remember but he was very small and used an undersized wheelchair. I drove a sedan and lifted him into the passenger's seat, adjusted his seatbelt and stowed his chair in the trunk.
Along the way we stopped
at a diner so he could use the bathroom. I lifted him from the car, carried
him inside and seated him on the toilet. I was strong but had never carried an
adult male – he was about my age – in so intimate a manner. (My son at the time
was almost four, and roughly the same size.) He was utterly unembarrassed and I tried to take my emotional
cues from him, which helped. We repeated the routine at the church and then at
the church hall where the wedding reception was held, and at the same diner on
the return trip. At the reception, I remember talking to him about the American
historian Francis Parkman, whom he was reading at the time.
For decades I’ve been
reading Dr. Bert Keizer in The Threepenny Review. He’s a Dutch physician
and author of Dancing with Mr. D: Notes on Life and Death (1996).
Here is a passage from a 2023 column, “On Loss,” that reminded me of Connecticut. Keizer describes one of his patients:
“With the help of a
sliding-board and a rope from the ceiling, she still managed to get from her
bed into the wheelchair without help. And in that way she could use the toilet
too, without having to be ‘hoisted across like a sack of potatoes.’ But when she turned eighty, she lost this
last straw of independence and wanted her life to end. People who walk around,
who wash and brush themselves when they feel like it, board a train or a plane
without giving it a thought, even pee and poo without having to ask anyone to
place them on the seat, and who moreover wipe their behind in their own
fashion—such people do not realize what a terrible thing it is when you
desperately need other people all of the time to help you perform these tasks.”
No wonder we have so many writers who were doctors – Keats, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Walker Percy, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Oliver Sacks, among others. The job descriptions overlap. Both specialize in human beings.
3 comments:
I enjoy the essays of the American physician, Richard Selzer (Mortal Lessons, Letters to a Yong Doctor). He can overwrite at times, but offers a fascination inside view of a world that vitally concerns me (and will more and more as I get older, of course). He's a nice corrective to medical soap opera cliches. Many years ago when I was hit with my first kidney stone, I knew instantly what it was, because I had read Selzer's essay on the malady.
Another sufferer from chronic ill-health was the poet Thomas Hood. Born in 1799 he died at age 45. He suffered from lifelong ill health and in his later years rarely left his bed. Yet he had a great sense of humour and wrote many comic poems, my own favourite being "Faithless Nelly Gray: A Pathetic Ballad". Lamb, Thackeray and others admired him.
I just remembered another literary doctor, though not the healthiest example (I couldn't resist) - Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the macabre poet and playwright, who aped the Jacobeans (pretty skillfully, too) and lived up to the image by quaffing poison.
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