The girl who lost one of her eyes

When she was nine years old, this girl had an abscess on her leg that spread to her face. It became so rampant that the doctors had to remove her right eye to control the infection. Since then she wore an artificial eye on that side — immaculately made to resemble her natural eye in the colour and even the fine details of the pupil. Her external eye muscles were sewn onto the prosthetic eye so that it moved together with her good eye on the left, only with minimal squint on the extreme lateral gazes. You could barely tell that it was artificial — I certainly couldn’t, until I closely examined with a torch!

4.May2011

This entry is filed under Doctors and tagged . There are 6 responses to this post.

Tell me what you think.

When she was in her teens, she had a boyfriend. She decided to tell her boyfriend that her right eye was actually fake, and her boyfriend left her immediately.

Later in her twenties she met a guy, and they fell in love and got together. When she was deliberating whether to tell this guy the truth about her eyes, there was anxiety and she wasn’t sure what to expect.

But she told him the truth — and the guy looked at her and replied, “So what? I’ve only got one eye too.”

Just a few years ago, the guy had got into a major motor vehicle accident with severe facial trauma and skull fractures. The doctors had to fix a metal plate in his forehead and tie his left cheekbone together with wires. His left eye was still intact, but the optic nerves had been cut. The scars have healed up well now and only a very slight displacement of his left eye is what remains. Just by looking at him, you couldn’t tell that he was seeing only from his right eye. She had not known until then.

“I guess we were made for each other,” the woman said to me, sitting beside him. They are soon approaching their seventies, and have been together as husband and wife for more than forty years now. This is a true story.

The guy and his girlfriend

This friendly guy had a stable girlfriend. Yet he was having sex with other girls, unbeknownst to his partner, and he was still doing it. Without condoms too, because he didn’t have them around when the situation called. He had already made two women pregnant. He already had a few children around in the community. He confessed to me.

28.Apr2011

This entry is filed under Doctors and tagged , . There are 8 responses to this post.

Tell me what you think.

He came in when I was working in the aboriginal GP clinic in the Northern Territory, wanting to have a check up for sexually-transmitted diseases.

He had good intentions, if I dare say. I could sense his frustration at knowing what is right and not living it out — and don’t we all know the feeling well. Yet as I talked to him I came to know that he had already made some other changes in his life that was worth commending. Decided to stand up to peer pressure and cut down on alcohol consumption. Starting to pick up the discipline to exercise. “But I still don’t know how to control this sexual urge,” he said as-a-matter-of-factly, “I just can’t control it, y’know.”

He saw the tray of free condoms in the room and grabbed to store more than a few in his pocket, with some embarrassment. I never paid much attention to that tray — now I know how important it is to refill it!

“How would you feel if your partner did the same?” I asked.

“Oh I’ve heard that one before. … But I won’t do it when I get married, it’ll be different,” he answered.

“How do you know you can control yourself after you get married, when you can’t do it now?”

“Yeah,” he shook his shoulders. I was sure the question had crossed his mind before too.

I opened my mouth but I stumbled to take it much further. If I said anything more, I felt, I would have been a true hypocrite. It doesn’t have to be sexual dishonesty. My words would come back to bite me.

Conversations at their death’s door

Marie and her rosy cheeks

I was asked to review the radiotherapy plan for Marie when I noticed on the CT images that her entire left lung was opacified. It turned out to be a haemothorax, as suspected. Her malignancy had resulted in auto-antibodies rendering her clotting system defective.

30.Jan2011

This entry is filed under Doctors and tagged , . There are 6 responses to this post.

Tell me what you think.

Two weeks ago I first met Marie in the clinic. She came with her son, daughter and daughter-in-law. They were obviously concerned about their mum and wanted the best, yet they understood there was only so much Medicine can do. Marie was in her fifties, but she did not look so at all. She came in well-groomed; her cheeks and lips were rosy with mild makeup. She had the gentlest speech, and her smiles were small, but frequent and sweet.

Now Marie was on the hospital bed in the trolley bay. No makeup this time — her complexion was pale, her lips grey, her hair messy from prolonged bed-stay. But she was still soft-spoken, and her smiles were still lovely as before.

I slowly explained to Marie what I found. “Things are progressing quite aggressively… And I’m not sure how rapidly this is going to continue,” I said as I watched for her reaction. “I’m really sorry, Marie.”

“That’s ok,” she said with a smile. It was as if she had expected this all along. “As long as the children are ok,” she added in passing. I didn’t quite understand at the time, but my mind drifted, for an instant, to recall the image of her son, daughter and daughter-in-law during the first clinic consult. She passed away the next day in the hospital.

Kenny and his dreams

In the same week, I had a conversation with Kenny. Kenny was a young man from Hong Kong. He had a wife Yen, and together they have a 5-year old son, who couldn’t understand yet that his dad was dying from colorectal cancer.

In a matter of days Kenny went from walking to being wheelchair-bound. On the CT images, his whole abdomen was solid with metastases. We knew his wife, brave as she was, was struggling to care for both Kenny and their little child at home. It came the time when I advised for inpatient admission to the palliative unit. It may very well be Kenny’s last destination in this life, and I wanted to make sure he and his wife understood the situation.

I remember his wife was wearing a T-shirt with verses from the book of Phillipians on it. I asked her about it, and it turns out I knew the church they attended. I realized too that when patients have a faith and hope to hold on to, these grim conversations become so much easier. I asked how long have they been in Australia for. It was two years ago when they came with their young son, on a working visa.

“What is it that you do?” I asked Kenny.
“I’m a lecturer at RMIT…”
“Oh what do you lecture on?”

“Building construction,” he replied, then added after a pause, “But all of that doesn’t matter anymore, Joseph.”

I guess that’s true. The following day Kenny’s cancer perforated his bowels. He was transferred to a private hospital, and that was the last I heard of him.

These conversations with Marie and Kenny at their deaths’ door helped me put some things back into perspective.

page 2