Spring

There’s something almost biblical about spring in Scandinavia. One day you wake up and see that all those greyish-brown hues have been replaced by a hopeful green that seems to shout, “It was just a joke! I died for a while only to come back to life.” And for a few months, the world seems like a better place. How long it lasts depends on the year. This one, for example, has taken until this week to reveal its flower-filled depths.

On Thursday, I was thinking about how beautiful the green of the trees looked against the blue of the sky on my way to work, when, right in front of the psychiatry building, I heard a man let out a heart-rending scream, the sort that makes you realise there’s a man inside suffering, and that it’s very likely impossible to rescue him.

I often wonder why I became a doctor. On days when I’m feeling cynical, I’ll say it was because I got the grades. On days when the clinic is full of women responding to treatment, I’ll say I did it to help people. On days when the clinic is full of patients whose cancer is progressing despite treatment, I probably won’t say anything. It is on those days that I feel the most contempt for people who idealise suffering as a source of wisdom or inspiration. People who go through life tormented because they believe the world cannot perceive their sensitivities. To those people I feel like saying: go and fuck off for a bit, and then we’ll talk.

There are days when I constantly wonder what it feels like to be trapped in a reality you cannot change. Like the man who screams, locked inside his own head. Or the patient who realises I have no further treatment to offer her and that perhaps it would be best to stop, but then weeps with her son, who is in his thirties, and who kicks and screams because the thought of losing his mother is unbearable.

How awful to die knowing you’re leaving behind someone for whom you were the anchor.

I spend my time drawing lines that help me understand the universal feeling that binds people who are suffering. I don’t know if it’s much use. It’s like trying to make the world fit within parameters that can be contained in my head. How ridiculous.

There are days, like today, when I simply watch my children play and wonder why I have no curiosity whatsoever about what their future will be like.

That today is enough.

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