chapter 6:part 4 Study Your Doctor

Continued from Chapter 6: part 3

We were shuffled around a lot before we actually met the Oncologist at Princess Margaret hospital.

First was Heather, our family doctor who struggled to find the cause of the pain. Was Hal behaving too stoically during his visits to her office? I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but from doctor number two and on, I was like his Siamese twin.

Doctor number two, Dr. Kroll the Gastroenterologist who admitted Hal from Emergency, was a pleasant, formal man who, like every doctor I met, worked long hours, but the person we saw most at this stage was the resident, Dana, and she was forthright. She drew a diagram of the intestines and showed where they thought the problem was. If we had asked her then what they might find during exploratory surgery, I believe she would have told us. We figured then that we had enough problems on our plate and settled for the diagram and the vague notion that this might be Crohn’s disease.

We got used to a certain ritual: when the chain of command altered and Hal was turned over to the next specialist, the previous doctor disappeared. We saw Dana at an elevator shortly after the surgeon took over and she looked blankly through us. We no longer were a part of her work schedule.

Then came number three, Doctor Beam, the surgeon who performed the operation and he was the most positive person we encountered; a person with that attitude is worth his weight in rubies. Because of his positive strength we raised our expectations about our needs and Hal’s rights. Because he was a surgeon, though, he wasn’t considered to be the person to take Hal further. He was the exception to the out-of-sight-out-of-mind rule; he never spoke in terms of writing us off and he maintained contact through Hal’s illness, having him come in every three months for a chat and a check-up. We appreciated those chats more than I can express.

Although the Oncologist took time to explain things to us, we sometimes left the clinic feeling upset and Doctor Beam, one step removed from our battle, had a way of soothing us and making everything seem clear, hopeful and reasonable.

continued in chapter 6: part 5