We reach the point where I find out whether I am a doctor. Not the medical professional kind, that ship sailed without me long, long, ago. I mean to say; This is the point I find out whether my vocation has survived the onslaught.
My mother was a teacher. It was built in. My grandmother returned from the shops one day to find her child in the yard with blackboard on an easel teaching the local children and their dog, all in a row. She went on to teach Latin in one of the most well respected girls' schools in the country. Of course she did. Teaching was her vocation. It was built right in.
If you were to list and describe all the careers and jobs we could happily spend our lives doing; I would choose to be a doctor. There is no doubt in my mind. I care and I want to help. I want to use reason and science to restore health and function. It burns in me. And though my illness prevented me from studying and qualifying, that inner state has remained. As I used to say to others in my situation: You can take the man out of medicine, but you cannot take the medicine out of the man.
At least that's what I thought. I have seen great teachers destroyed by wild and unruly classes. I have seen them broken in spirit over time, dreading each lesson and each day, for they know that learning is absolutely impossible in an environment where the wilfully ignorant rule. I have seen them withdraw and end their careers in silent suffering and pain. They were not weak, they were not incapable of controlling a class, but in a context where they were left without support and without sanction, their lives became a misery. A beautiful gift, their vocation, crushed under the weight of children who preferred abuse and knife-play.
A while back, I found myself in the same position. There are many ways to do medicine and I had found one. At long last I could express my heartfelt desire to be of service. But healing was made impossible by a wall of abuse and hatred and it seemed to me as if my very vocation had been obliterated, washed away like a sandcastle in the tide. It was very hard to go on without my reason to be. One finds oneself with only that awful, depressive, consumptive phrase "What's the point?" for company. The mistake, I had learned from observing teachers, was to stay put. Where an environment becomes toxic, you must leave it, or you will perish. I left it very late to accept this. Medicine is like that: it is hard to walk away from obvious need. But I did so and, for a time, I believed that abuse from M.E patients and charities had destroyed the very vocation in my heart.
In recent days I found myself facing a choice: I have the bare bones of a possible treatment for M.E. I have a set of ideas that may explain the problem, or at the very least form a part of any solution. The choice before me is whether I should test these ideas on myself. If I am correct I can break my recovery, bring myself back down to severe M.E and then lift myself right back out of it. It is quite a scary thought. Severe M.E can be an almost unbearable torture. But then; that very knowledge should drive all medical men and women to devote their resources to the problem.
Through my choice, imagined or real, I find out who I am. Am I a man broken and pierced by the slings and arrows of outrageous bastardry? Or am a yet a physician, trying his best to help the people he cares so much about?
I hope with all my heart that I am the doctor.
