The Christmas story...Soft medicine

Its difficult when you are so depleted & worn low to look at Christmas with enthusiasm. Its a time for family and celebration, reconciliation and joy. Instead I found myself torn & tearful, awaiting the scan and its results; too much emotion, my stress bucket  brimming over. Feeling hope yet hopeless, whilst all the time striving to be cheerful, positive, upbeat, in short 'Merry'.

Late on the afternoon of Christmas eve the phone rang and one of the hospital oncologists had gone out of his way to call to inform us that largely speaking the scan results were good. No sign of active cancer in the lower torso, again some anomalies in the left chest area that they wanted to ask the respiratory specialists to consider. Probably not cancer, could be from a previous infection, blood tests should clarify this and any actions could then be decided with the oncologist in January. We were overjoyed, it had worked. All those weeks of drugs, distress ,illness & infirmity had paid off; at least for a while we had a truly positive outcome and this man had taken it upon himself to give us the best of all Christmas gifts with this good news.

So we had a truly joyful Christmas and a tired, but uplifting, new year. We visited France & French friends, languished in front of wood fires and at midnight into the new year drank champagne  outside our lovely French farmhouse; looking at the stars and listening to the church bells from the villages and the laughter & distant noise of happy voices.

We returned early January to meet with the lead oncologist  and discuss this further & here is where we found  a phenomenon we had experienced before & seems almost inevitable in cancer care. Its called confusion...' Medical Mixed Message Syndrome'. Not a true  ailment or affliction, but seems to exist whenever serious illness and human emotions need to be considered. Its about how words are used and delivered, its about the academic, purely logical analysis and the experiential voice of reason and empathy with truth.
The news was no different, the facts no clearer or changed, but how the words were delivered and their effect was very different. We were given all the possible outcomes, all the negative possibilities and our questions and the side effects politely listened too and then dismissed.

Its not that the words had different meanings, or that the message was changed, more that the overall effect was undermining, less positive, flat and we came away feeling deflated and anxious. Not till a weekend of discussing and dismembering did we come to realise nothing had fundamentally changed. Then on Monday we had calls from support staff at both hospitals which re-spun the facts, had positive structure and affirmed our pre-Christmas optimism.

Its partly that the minds of some medics are so high functioning that they can't move into the real world of people & empathy skills and partly that they need to deal with certainties and will not enter into the realm of empathy, aspiration and hope. I call it 'Soft Medicine'; the  analogy lies in the artistic concept of ' Form and Function', should a design be beautiful for the sake of beauty or should it always have functionality first.

I think our medics have a difficult line to tread; between experiential & life affirming versus academic & clinical  accuracy. Its seems to me its all about the spaces between the grains of sand.

They say 'Beware the surgeons blade', but perhaps we should be more fearful of his words.