Dr, Jedidiah's Diary Episode #8

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 7^th 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

       

   5.  Lewy Body Dementia: (proper name) While Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, the second most common is known as Lewy Body Dementia. This dementia is caused by protein (lewy bodies) which end up in the nerve cells in the brain. These are attracted to the areas that control memory, movement and thought processes. This causes the dementia which is so commonly observed. Most of the symptoms mirror that of alzheimer’s disease. (source from https://healthnfitness.net/read/dealing-with-alzheimers-and-dementia?k=what%20is%20lewy%20body&a=60207515487&cmp=1453605291&p=&n=s&d=c&dm=&m=e&kid=kwd-6817536320&c=294769016050&p=1t3&tr=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwgOzdBRDlARIsAJ6_HNl-wtjAF_YrZ_7fATlr8TWn2eTOHGpB8ThO6kJKu4v_CNPHlIomN3UaAsPnEALw_wcB)

   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