If you’re local and you need a piano tuned, you need this guy. He’s the best.
And then later this afternoon…
I don’t remember what I saw him for; just the reaction years ago of this family practitioner, the most gentle and caring doctor, asking, Is there anything else going on?
I could only laugh. He’d seen me previously as the on-call when my children had been babies running around his legs in the examining room, so he did know my face, but not that I’d since been diagnosed with lupus. And then asthma. And then nine years after the first, Crohn’s.
His shoulders fell, his pen went quiet on the page, he looked at me steadily as he took that in a moment, knowing I still had children at home to raise at the time. A bit of wonderment at the relatively-healthy-looking woman of good cheer in front of him, then, “You’ve got a full plate.” As simple and direct a summing-up as I have ever heard.
It was one of those moments where someone says the right thing at the right time in the right way and makes everything okay. I have never forgotten it.
Michelle was having post-accident problems that warranted being seen again to make sure there wasn’t a break, so we took her to the clinic. The nurse took her back to where they did x-rays, they talked about physical therapy; we waited. I knitted. Made good progress on the thing, too, to where you could actually see what the lace was going to be when it grew up.
She came out with one of those clunky black strapped-on one-size-doesn’t-fit-most thingummies on her foot, and while she was filling us in on the visit, turned out he was again the on-call doctor covering for today and he came out to greet us and I wonder whether to see if we her parents were who he thought we would be? But he had one more thing to mention re her knee, so he came and good, we hadn’t left yet.
He’s Richard’s regular doctor, he’d seen me back in February and remembered the days, and there we three were, here still, together, supporting each other…and he was beyond delighted, a moment again of stopping and taking it all in–in joy this time. I could just see the wow, she’s not a baby anymore! twinkling in his eyes.
To life!