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Notes from a HealerHeartfelt Morning Brian T. Maurer Suddenly I was awake. The luminescent dial on the bedside digital clock read 4:44 a.m. Quietly I arose, dressed and padded down the stairs. I found my coat and cap in the darkness, and pulled the collar up around my neck when I stepped outside. The wind was up; I could hear it howling through the tree branches overhead. Quickly I stooped to gather the remnants of the recycling that had blown out of the bin on our back stoop. Standing up, I glanced at the sky. There, in the west, a full moon hung behind wisps of grey clouds. It would be two more hours before the early January sunrise. The car started easily. I checked the side-view mirror and pulled out onto the street. In anticipation of freezing rain, town trucks had sanded the road some time during the night; but the air had turned unseasonably warm. I tested the brakes at the stop sign—solidly, with no skidding, they held. I drove on through the darkness in silence. Leaves blew across the road, dancing momentarily in my headlights. Ten minutes later I pulled into my friend’s driveway, backed the car around and waited. Shortly, he appeared, overdressed in his winter parka, holding an ancient leather suitcase. He slid into the seat beside me and extended a hand in greeting. “All set?” I asked. He nodded; but then, snapping his fingers, he suddenly remembered the outside light. “Oh, well, too late to turn it off now. Left my keys inside the house. They told me not to take any valuables.” We pulled out of his driveway, leaving the sentinel garage light burning outside in the darkness. As we headed toward the city, my friend reviewed some last minute details. He had paid all of his bills up through the middle of the month; he told me where he had left certain things that I needed to know about and how to disarm the security alarm if I needed to access the house. Afterwards, we chatted about the price of home heating oil, and then he told me a funny story he had heard on the radio about a hillbilly family that lived so far out in the boondocks, they had to drive to town just to go hunting. Minutes later I turned into the driveway and followed the short loop around to the main entrance of the hospital. “Want me to go in with you?” I asked. “No need to.” “Well then,” I said, extending my hand, “good luck.” He chuckled. “Everybody keeps saying that. At this juncture, I’m not sure what it means.” He opened the rear door of the car and extracted his suitcase. I watched him enter the hospital through the huge sliding glass doors like a lonely traveler stepping into a public transportation terminal, anxious to board his train. As I pulled away from the curb, I reflected that in a few hours my friend—who had no immediate family—would be lying flat on an operating room table with his chest cracked open, his heart in the hands of a cardiac surgeon working meticulously to sew a new aortic valve in place. Driving home through what was left of the night, I noticed the sentinel garage light as I passed by my friend’s house, still burning in the darkness. About the Author Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatric medicine as a Physician Assistant for the past three decades. As a clinician, he has always gravitated toward the humane aspect in patient care—what he calls the soul of medicine. Over the past decade, Mr. Maurer has explored the illness narrative as a tool to enhance the education of medical students and cultivate an appreciation for the delivery of humane medical care. His first book, Patients Are a Virtue, recently reviewed in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, is a collection of fifty-seven patient vignettes illustrating what Sir William Osler called “the poetry of the commonplace” in clinical medical practice. Published: January 8, 2009 |
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