When I graduated from med school, I took an oath. A Hippocratic Oath, they
called it. It went something like this:
I do solemnly swear that I’ll be loyal to the profession of medicine… that I’ll
prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability and my
judgment… and as to diseases, I swear to make a habit of two things: to help, or at
least, to do no harm.
First, do no harm: it was the golden rule. A safeguard. A measure in which to
judge my work. A highly principled and ethical physician, I believed it
wholeheartedly. But that was BC: before Christabel.
I was a doctor. A good one. About twenty patients a day – fifteen minutes with
each – not a bad little practice. I don’t know how many patients I saw. My accountant
probably has the exact figure buried in a shoebox somewhere. But I know I saw a lot.
I treated all of them. Even helped a few. But true to my training, human beings
transformed into patients the moment they entered my small city practice: walking,
talking, diagnostic entities, straight out of the pages of a med book. Nice and neat.
And my consulting room was nestled amongst the big city offices. It used to be a
church, actually. I liked the symbolism of it; you know, medicine replacing faith and
all that.
Most of my patients were busy executives eager to return to work. And as a
wooden, almost emotionless, asexual, and appropriately clinical man, that suited me
just fine. No small talk. In and out. And away we go. If I couldn’t help them, then I
put on my most compassionate face, and I listened. I learnt quickly that listening is a
kind of therapy. Maybe even a kinder therapy. But nothing validated a patient’s
concerns better than scrawling a fancy brand-name across my prescription pad. I was
increasingly convinced that most physical ailments originated in the mind; that
medicine was not the polar opposite of psychiatry as I had once thought.
The average life expectancy for a man is about eighty-five. Trust me: I’m a
doctor. Eighty-five summers and it’s all over. It doesn’t sound like much, does it,
when I put it like that? But I’d give away all my seasons to come to return to that
single summer when Christabel first walked through my doors. I won’t even bother
describing her. For now, just assume that she was beautiful. (And she was).
Christabel came to me with a serious complaint: her husband. Aaron Daniels –
his friends called him Jack – enjoyed a stellar career as a corporate lawyer, but
insisted on disregarding his Alcohol Intolerance Syndrome. He drank with the senior
partners of his firm, to be one of the boys, to be seen as partner material. Each binge
brought him one step closer to his last, and the cycle continued unabated, month in,
month out. He’d score a win at work then celebrate into the night. It brought
intolerable suffering to Christabel who responded to the late night phone calls and
made the routine rush to hospital. She was literally worried sick and I’m sure that I
wrote her name on as many prescriptions as I did for Aaron. I hated him for it. I was
their long time – and long suffering – family physician.
My professional training was designed to insulate me from becoming
emotionally involved in Christabel’s marriage, from developing resentment for
Aaron’s insolence, and from feeling pangs of sympathy for patients. At least I thought
so, until I made the house-call that would change everything.
I remember laying eyes on Christabel. She had been crying. I recognized the
look: smudged mascara, bloodshot eyes, and the dark rings around her eyes from
worrying well into the night. She thanked me for coming and lamented that Aaron
was out drinking again. To this day, I still can’t say why I did it, what I was thinking,
and what I thought it would achieve. But I kissed her. And Christabel kissed me back.
I wanted it to stop right then and there as much as I wanted it to last forever. I knew
that my patients saw me for help, some for comfort, but none for love. But I simply
couldn’t help myself helping her. If I had caught a glimpse of myself in the office
mirror, I’m sure the stark reality of seeing me kissing a patient would have been
enough to pry my lips from hers. Instead, I pulled her in closer and held her tighter. I
wanted to pull away, to tell her that what I felt was not lust, a dirty love, but
something pure and paternalistic.
And the whole time I kept my eyes open during the kiss. I could have closed
them and enjoyed the images that flickered behind my eyelids; the fractured mix of
reality and imagination, the lies in my mind. Instead, I opened my mouth wider to
take more of her inside me. Maybe I wanted to see her expression, to convince myself
that it was actually happening. To see if she loved me in the same way that I loved
her. Or perhaps I kissed her with my eyes open to remind myself that I had crossed
the line, that I was responsible for my greatest professional indiscretion. Or maybe I
knew that if I closed my eyes then opened them, that she would be gone. Quite
possibly, in hindsight, I kept my eyes open to prevent the tears from streaming down
my face.
It had been my habit to close my eyes to bear the most beautiful ache of a
particular passage of a song that seemed to somehow cut deeper into my heart than
others. Closing my eyes would have intensified the experience of my lips touching
hers for the first time. Blocking out everything tends to heighten other things, in the
same way that my deaf patients developed an acute sense of smell and taste.
And with my eyes wide open and my heart exposed, raw and tender, I made
the decision that changed everything. To save their marriage, I had to tear Aaron’s life
apart. I gently pulled Christabel’s ear towards my mouth and whispered my plan. And
we waited in silence until he arrived home.
‘Dr Goodman,’ he said, surprised to see me, steadying himself. ‘What’s up,
doc?’
His lopsided smile stretched across his face. His body pickled with alcohol, he
clutched the staircase railing to steady himself.
‘Sit down, Aaron,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to tell you but your liver damage is
irreversible – you have less than a year to live.’
And that was it. I told him coolly as Christabel’s eyes diverted to the ground.
The deliberately misleading diagnosis. Out of anger, out of spite, out of jealously or
love, I would never be sure.
The truth was that Aaron was not dying, not yet. No doctor in the world would
have concurred with my diagnosis. For Christabel, however, it was the correct
diagnosis as she watched him undergo a life changing transformation over the coming
months that made her fall in love with him all over again. And I suffered all over
again.
By the time the year deadline came and went, I had given up on medicine, my
judgement, and Christabel. There were times when I would try to retell the story of
my agonizing struggle to uphold the Hippocratic Oath. How I blamed myself for
taking out my frustrations on Aaron for ignoring my medical advice and hurting
Christabel. And for letting my love for her punch a hole in my professional armour.
But, somehow, it never came out as a story of compromised ethics, but a tale of
unspeakable love.
I was trusted to do no harm. But that was before Christabel.
A doctor deliberately misdiagnoses a man’s illness to guarantee his death after falling in love with the man’s wife. (19 words)
(With the exception of historical dramas, the general rule is to not tag a protagonist with a specific name. Rather identify him by his role in the plot.)