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 Demi 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
15. Living Final Days Fully in Colors
It was late autumn in 2017. The Good Samaritan hospice,
where I was volunteering as a shrink twice a month, was filled with way more somber
mood than any other sad days. Every patient at the hospice was feeling a huge
void in their heart that day. Ricky was gone.
Ricky Valore was one of the terminally ill patients who
had been seeing me in the consultation room for over a year. Had they not ever
known that the place was a hospice facility, one could have thought of Ricky as
the most cheerful, bubbly guy in the whole world. He’d always smile at everyone,
humming Billy Holiday’s oldies but goodies tune all the time. It was only in
that private consultation room with me when Ricky was showing his physical and
mental anguish to the bone.
As the heavily depressed mood was sinking in at the end
of our consultation session, Ricky used to say “Thank you doc for hearing me out again. Want me to belt out Jacky Wilson’s Lonely
Teardrops now? Yeah…we need to snap out of this bad mood, right? I’m not as
smooth as Jacky, but I can still jump and collapse like a feather!” All I could
do for him then was no more than giving him a great big smile, wondering where this
frail old man would gather all the force to stay upbeat even in the throes of
his struggle to survive such a devilish illness.
I was increasing my personal time as a volunteer shrink
outside my clinic to spend more days, even if it just meant a few more days,
with patients at the Good Samaritan Hospice ward. Each time I paid a visit,
Ricky’s dance moves or singing voice were gradually getting out of sight in the
hallway or the living room. He had become bed-ridden with more sedatives and pain
alleviators than just a few months before. When his eyes met mine on my last
visit with him before his demise, Ricky was trying to say a few words that were
hardly heard without my ears right next to his mouth. As he was tapping his
thin fingers on his white linen sheet, which just looked as if he was able to
hear the IV drips, Ricky repetitively said “…should have come here earlier, …..should
have been earlier than that….” I knew what he meant by those words. Most
terminally ill patients that I’d met at Good Samaritan must have understood Ricky’s
mind. All they wished for the rest of their lives was staying in painless
state.
I
came to think more about the palliative
treatment and care for patients diagnosed with serious illness. A lot of them
I met said they had to be shuffled around by their family to get active
treatments to no avail against their own will. When they learned about this
peaceful way of wrapping up their lives with no pain, they were already so
tired of convincing their family to let them turn to hospice where palliative
care was provided. Ricky was one of them. After being hospitalized for so long,
resorting to all those intricate
machines that prolonged his life, he just wished for a handful of moments day
to day with peace of mind to forget that he was soon be gone. It was not giving
up their beloved family at all. Since his family finally listened to Ricky’s wish
and brought him to Good Samaritan, the colors of his final days turned bright
and jolly like his signature dance moves that resembled like Jackie Wilson’s velutinous and velvety smooth version.
Just
like his name claims, Ricky Valore fought for his final days with true valor,
not as a hopeless patient on his deathbed, but as a strong and cheerful trooper
for life.
Expressions
1.
to hear
one out: to listen to them without interrupting them
until they have finished saying everything that they want to say
2.
to belt
out:
to sing out loud
3.
palliative
care:
a palliative care is an action that is intended to make the effects of a
problem less severe but does not actually solve the problem.
4.
to resort
to something: to adopt something because you cannot see
any other way of achieving what you want
5.
velutinous: silky/
soft and velvety
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