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The Lecture
Sara Bozorg
He finishes and the crowd starts their applause. The lights shimmer on and those squished against the wall and those sitting on the steps slowly rise to stretch. It is time for questions. 'Mrs. Harrison! Go ahead.' I crane to look, thrilled, because I know Mrs. Harrison. I saw her in clinic last week. I try to remember: in the upper right hand corner of the note was her target pressure, 12 and 12. In the middle left side was the visual field data. And her diagnosis: primary open-angle glaucoma.
'Thank you for your talk, Dr. W., being a patient for the last seven-teen years, I was wondering about the link between...'
Seventeen years. Seventeen years she had been coming back to see Dr. W. Now she was standing, white curly hair and brown dress suit, in the auditorium filled with patients. As she talked, he responded, and I wondered how she had appeared to him all those years ago. Things change in that time. Real change. New grandsons. Deaths. Moves. Wrinkles. New techniques and surgeries. And he had seen her over this time. And she was only one patient.
The room was filled, overflowing, with patients. His patients. There was a strange calmness - an exciting familiarity - to the scene. As if I had seen this dimly lit room before. This picture. But a long, long time ago. Perhaps in an old medical text. Perhaps an image created in my mind from the stories of William Carlos Williams. A romanticism of medicine and doctoring that had been fading alongside the hundred patient clinics, billing sheets, and uninsured patients I had let down. But here it was. For the first time it was clearly and overwhelmingly before me again.
A doctor and the patients he had worked with, for, and treated. All these patients he had sat with - explained success and failures. Loss of vision. Loss of a job. A marriage. A daughter. He had sat with Mrs. Harrison as she explained her husband's death. When no one was left but him to listen. And he had. And always would be, here to see them through their treatments, and their lives.