fragment 1

Tomorrow we’re doing a bilateral orchidectomy on a prostate cancer patient. Study up some anatomy tonight, and come and assist, eh? You can sit on one side, I’ll sit on the other. It’s a simple operation.

So said the urology registrar to me, a raw, terrified intern who barely knew what day it was, let alone how to operate on a poor defenceless man with cancer.

It was 1989. I had been working for about four months as an intern at a war veterans hospital. I started in the rehabilitation ward, looking after people who’d had strokes and could no longer speak, walk, understand anyone else, eat properly, you name it. Damage to their brains had wiped out one or more of the functions that the rest of us take for granted every day of our lives.

Then I went to the respiratory ward, where the registrar had a modified machine-gun laugh that he let fire onto unfortunate victims when speaking to them of their diagnoses. Good morning Mr Jones, heh-heh-heh, we’ve got your biopsy results, heh-heh-heh, you’ve got a form of lung cancer, heh-heh-heh, it’s called squamous cell. The only reason he got away with it was that his patients were either too stunned to register, or they took it not as laughter but as some sort of tic.

Next was the kidney ward, where all things urological were treated. It was mainly prostate problems, including cancer. And sometimes the treatment for prostate cancer was removal of both of the testicles. Hence the request from the registrar that I help him with this procedure.

I entered medicine because my father wanted me to do it. Secure job, reasonable pay, work for life, that sort of thing. And one of his brothers had a son who was a doctor, which I suspect also had something to do with it. Being a fairly compliant daughter, I went along with the idea, even though my strengths lay in other areas. So obvious was this disjunct between what my father wanted and what I was good at that all the teachers spoke to him about their concerns with his decision.

But the more they talked, the firmer was his mind made up. I knew when I got the acceptance letter in the mail that it was the wrong course. But as the only child of a controlling father and placating mother, and my own keen desire to keep the peace, I kept my mouth shut and got on with it. Its easy to make up scenarios of different outcomes twenty-six years later, when everything has changed.

Medicine was interesting, but I was out of my depth. I’d always been an anxious child. During the course of those six years of study, anxiety became my closest companion, depression and mild mania enclosed me in their arms. I could not, however much I tried, remember all those facts.

Towards the end of the course, when my relationship with my parents had deteriorated beyond my endurance, I decided it was time I left home (I was twenty-three after all). In return, my father told me I had been adopted. In such a state, I began work caring for the sick.

Being asked to help remove a man’s testicles, even in the name of therapy, was the beginning of the end. The morning of that surgery, I froze. I could not move a single muscle. I lay in bed incapable of speaking, moving, thinking. It must have been two or three hours before the panic lessened, and I could rise.

I left medicine a short time later, never to return.