Dr.
Jedidiah’s Diary
Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling,
meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who
lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self
for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands
of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new
people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him
different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support
groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths
through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest
with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food
for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.
Episode # 8 The Loneliest Journey Called
Fighting Depression
It
seemed as if this guy named Antonio had been everywhere I went. At the
parent-teacher conference, grocery market, community rec department hall for
the extended education for adults, the prom photo session for his high schooler
kids as a parent, local art museum, my go-to gin mill “Last Chance”……….and finally, in the ‘support group meets’
at my office. As a shrink who had the acute emotional antennae, I could tell
his firm-set lips were the emblem of his deep and old depression
that had already sunk in his world-weary
life a while ago.
Antonio
started to feel somewhat funny and weird each time he got in a car to go out.
He said his head was completely blank, looking at the gauge in the driver’s
seat. ‘What should I do first to start this car?’, ‘Am I going out?.....or have
I just gotten back home?’, ‘Wait…did my daughter call me to pick her up a few
minutes ago…or was it yesterday?’ Antonio went on to explain that he’d been
feeling terribly stiff in his shoulder and back, which had made him walk like
hunchback of Notre Dame. According to what he’d been going through, Antonio’s
body and soul were getting progressively weaker and damaged to the point of
having occasional hallucination. I introduced Antonio to a neurosurgeon who is
a close buddy of mine, and he was diagnosed with Lewy Body dementia. I saw
several slits on both of his wrists, which was showing more than his anguish.
It was hopelessness, tribulations, and
dying embers.
I
asked Antonio what about the disease is making him feel like ending his own
life like that. He remained silent for a few minutes and said “I didn’t want to
see myself going and looking crazy for the rest of my life. Thought I’d better
die before everyone around me collapsed one by one seeing me gradually
deteriorate.” I came to understand why Antonio had been trying hard to be
everywhere. He might have wanted to do normal things that others do, which
would soon become strenuous chores
to his body that’s wasting away.
On
the 7th meeting with Antonio at my clinic, he did not show up. The
ticking of the wall clock in my office seemed to holler at me “Contact his
family!” No one including Antonio answered my call. My heart was racing. Later
that afternoon, the grievous news
reached me. He was gone forever to the place where no such pain named dementia
with Lewy’s Disease exists.
In hindsight,
both Antonio and I might have felt a premonition
of his death through the time we’d shared. He was quiet most of the time, and
his life seemed to be out of brio
all along. However, I thought I could help him librate through our talks over a bottle of beer, meetings, frequent
emails, and even by sitting in silence at my office. Wrong. I was totally
wrong. So wrong that I could hardly breathe, being disgusted by the years and
years of my own high-and-mightiness written
all over my face in the mirror as a psychiatrist. All the words that I gave him
just bounced off the wall that he’d built, never penetrated or permeated deep
down his inner self at all. Antonio was living in the world that I wasn't able to see, and vice versa.
Today
I am sitting alone at the same spot in my and Antonio’s favorite pub ‘Last
Chance’. Here, Antonio must have felt that he was on the edge of a precipice of his life. What if I took a better care of Antonio’s unstable physical and
emotional state? What if I tried harder to research and gave him a more clear
solution to cope with such an unfamiliar illness? What if I did not take it for
granted to see him quiet most of the time? What if…..
I am
still asking myself the same old series of questions over and over again.
Expressions
1.
gin mill: (noun) tavern consisting of a building
with a bar and public rooms; often provides light meals
2. firm-set lips: (noun)
well-knit lips/ the lips that are
adamantly closed
3. emblem: (noun) symbol/ sign/ representation
4. world-weary: (adjective) feeling or showing fatigue from or
boredom with the life of the world and especially material pleasure
6. tribulation:
(noun) suffering or difficulty that you go through in a particular situations
7.
ember: (noun)embers
of a fire are small pieces of wood or coal that remain and glow with heat after
the fire has finished burning
8.
strenuous:
(adjective) involving a lot of hard work, effort, and energy
9.
grievous:
(adjective) shocking, deplorable, dreadful, appalling
10. in hindsight: (adverbial
phrase) in retrosp
Considering or analyzing the
past, with the knowledge that one has now.
11. premonition:
(noun) a presentiment of the future; a foreboding; a forewarning
12. brio:
(noun) vim, vigor or vivacity of style or performance
13. to
librate: (intransitive verb) to remain balanced or poised
14. high-and-mightiness: (noun)
haughtiness/ arrogance
15. precipice: (noun) a cliff with a vertical or nearly vertical or overhanging
face/ or figuratively meaning a situation of great peril
