Man Of Few Words

Chapter 92

Friday

There are so many different doctors and nurses here. It seems like I meet at least one new one every day. "My" doctor is Dr. Jiang, and I see her most days. But she's not here every day, so sometimes I get a substitute. And the huge team of nurses seems to be on constant rotation. I'm trying to learn all their names, but it's pretty hopeless. They don't seem to mind at all; I expect it's a common problem.

Every member of staff who sets foot in this room asks me how I'm feeling. At first I found this mildly irritating and would give a stock response like "Been better", "Not too bad" or "Okay, I suppose". But some of them, Dr. Jiang in particular, would follow up with more specific questions. Dr. Jiang would even go so far as to stop whatever else she was doing, sit down next to the bed, and wait for me to answer.

She was gently and persistently teaching me something, and after a few days I got the message. The lesson was simple: these people really do want to know how I'm feeling. Talking about it makes it easier for them to do their jobs, and helps me to feel... well, better than I otherwise would.

It's as if they've all somehow found the time to take a crash course in counselling. Maybe they have. Or maybe it's that sincerity thing I started noticing a couple of weeks ago. Maybe they just innately care.

So now I talk about how I'm feeling every day, often several times a day. I appreciate and value it much more than I would ever have thought possible. It's such a load off that I don't really feel the urge to unload negativity into this book so strongly any more. I mean, I'm not just going to abruptly stop writing...

Well, actually I am, I suppose. But I mean...

Ah shit, crying again. This one really blindsided me. Didn't see it coming at all.

Saturday

You've probably noticed that, prior to being admitted as an inpatient, I didn't write very much at all about hospitals, doctors, nurses, tests, diagnoses, treatments and that kind of thing. This wasn't because there wasn't an awful lot of that kind of thing going on. It was because it felt like that kind of thing was all that was going on, so I was using this book to focus on anything else I could think of. I still am. Although now I'm in hospital all day, every day, you can except a bit of a shift.

The fact is that when I was diagnosed, the technicalities just washed over me. I didn't understand what the doctors were telling me, and I didn't want to try to. What difference did it make? The one thing I did understand was that there was no way out of this. The potential benefits of surgery or chemotherapy were minor, and both had a pretty high chance of killing me prematurely. So all that could be done was to use a carefully balanced cocktail of drugs to minimise my suffering while nature took its brutal course. I'll never know how successful it's been. Even the doctors have told me that while the research is pretty robust, there's a lot of guesswork when it comes to dealing with individual cases. Still, I'm willing to believe that without any treatment at all, the last few months would probably have been considerably worse.

Without the people who prescribed the drugs and monitored my condition too. Not because of the tests and treatments, you understand. Because of the people. Yes dear reader, it seems that, among many other things, imminent death makes you a cheesier writer.

Not so long ago, I thought doctors were just doing their jobs. They were doing their well­-paid jobs at the same nominal level of incompetence as almost everyone else. Sure, I thought, there are some truly exceptional individuals in the medical profession, just as there are in all professions (commercial copywriting, for example). But even in the private sector you're lucky if you can find one.