If there’s a disease whose symptoms are a complete lack of social energy coupled with a complete lack of knowing what the hell to do with yourself, you definitely have that disease. The weary days just keep on coming. You wonder if it’s just a variety of laziness in a darkish disguise. You wonder this thought out loud to your brother, a panelbeater who has worked at least seventy hours a week since the day he became an apprentice and who says, “Kaz, any mildly evolved human being has a tendency towards laziness.” That distracts you for a few minutes. There’s an over-the-counter treatment widely available from any shelf in any bottle shop that offers rapid relief, but luckily or unluckily – depending – you find the side effects intolerable. You hope the malaise will pass. That there’ll be something that compels you to pry your face-plant off the pillow each time the sun comes up. Something that’s not bad for you.
At work you split the day into hours, and count them down. Towards the end of a consultation, a long-term patient stops at the clinic door and nervously says, “Are you thinking of quitting medicine?” The thought had crossed your mind about four thousand times, but you were pretty sure you’d kept acting normal – engaged, constructive, nodding, listening, remembering key details, ordering your patients the appropriate investigations. You hadn’t once sighed, cried, interrupted, or handed over a bullshit prescription so as to end the consultation within the allocated time. You hadn’t thrown your notes into the air or said, “Fuck it.” Besides, you are genuinely very fond of her. That consultation had been the most pleasant part of your workday. You ask her why she asked and she says, “I don’t know, just a feeling.” You want to say sorry, I’m doing my best here, but you aren’t sure what you’ve done besides waking up one day to find yourself so saturated in gloom it’s apparently leaking out your pores. She tiny-touches your arm, as if it’s an ember. “Please, hang in there.” You close the door, find your eyes stinging, feel ridiculous and bet this shit never happens to the professors.
Then, after work, someone steals your dog from outside the supermarket. You’re attempting some multi-bloody-tasking (dump bag, grab dog, so you can walk dog, buy food, and be home in time to greet your children). The dog’s small and silent so you carry her into the shop but are immediately ordered out by a guy in a red uniform. So you tie her up and ten minutes later she’s gone. Everyone shrugs. You go home feeling sick. Your daughters are beside themselves, which brings on a deep ache that can only be emanating from your actual pericardium. And you’re reminded that emotions are physical sensations, and that pain is a sensation and an emotion, and you press your palm to your chest and feel a memory-of-wonder, if not outright wonder, at the mystery of it all. The ache and your daughters’ faces spur you to action. You remember that you’ve always been good in a crisis. You march back to the supermarket, howling children in tow. The man in the red uniform (guilty, sensing you are seconds away from nothing-to-lose) agrees to show you the CCTV footage – two pretty young ponytailed girls untying your family pet and hotfooting away. You film the footage on your phone without asking and call the cops (who, surprisingly, give a shit). Your daughters text the footage to their friends, one of whom lives in the nearby flats, and, yes, she saw those exact girls with the old man from downstairs. He turns out to be their granddad and confirms that, yes, they did “rescue” a small silent dog from outside the supermarket and took it home: 50 kilometres away. Everyone piles into the car and you start driving. By now it’s dark and you’re still in pinching clothes, your pulse is in your neck and no one’s eaten a thing, but no one’s crying, it’s a road trip in a movie about a miracle, and the dog, the dog is so happy to see you she jumps and spins as if the concrete is a trampoline and then – adorably, heartbreakingly – she vomits on your shoes.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the tremendously talented editors at The Monthly who untangled the tangled and made sense out of chaos. First it was John van Tiggelen and then Nick Feik. Natalie Book, Patrick Witton, Michael Lucy, Chris Feik, Kirstie Innes-Will and Rebecca Bauert also greatly improved my efforts with their excellent editing skills. Thank you to my friends and colleagues for their precious time, love, wisdom and advice over the years. There are so many who have assisted me, but in particular I would like to thank my incredible brother Robert Hitchcock, Kathy-Lee Hitchcock, Jillian Hitchcock, Jennifer McKenzie, Helen Garner, Dr Michael Oldmeadow, Leone Oldmeadow, Fiona Patten, Christine Kenneally, Dr Martin Williams, Morry Schwartz, Dr Prash Puspanathan, Don Watson, Professor Paul Komesaroff, Dr Barbara Morrow, Redmond Symons, Oscar Zentner, Dr Alan Cheng, Devereaux De Silva, Dr Nigel Strauss, Dr John Olsen, Professor Kylie O’Brien, Dr Steve Ellen, and the loves of my life: Yvonne and Ida. Dr Lisa Mitchell and Dr Michael Currie patiently and thoughtfully read and commented on so many hundreds of drafts over the years that they should probably be considered co-authors. Thank you to Rachel Berger my wise and beautiful fellow-farmer. And David (“Thomas”) Bertram: beloved mensch. I am grateful to my patients for trusting me with their bodies and their stories. I hope I have treated both with care. Thank you to my family for tolerating my crazy work hours for the many years of my training and city hospital appointment. I am so very grateful and so sorry.
Dr Karen Hitchcock is a general physician whose clinical work has focused on pain, fatigue, medically unexplained symptoms and obesity. She holds a PhD in English and writes regular essays for The Monthly. She is the author of the Quarterly Essay Dear Life and the story collection Little White Slips, which won the Steele Rudd award in the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. Hitchcock was one of the first authorised prescribers of medicinal cannabis in Australia.
The Medicine Page 23