Both sides now

It is said that the Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell penned the lyrics for her song "Clouds" as a mere teenager. If you've ever heard this song, you will appreciate how astonishing this is. Well, like Joni, I too have looked at life from both sides now. As I embark on my clinical training interviewing and examining patients in a hospital setting, I still see each patient as myself. Let me explain. When I found myself in hospital in the New Year of 2005 I didn't know what had hit me. Finding myself with failed health in hospital did not fit with my life plan. However, I had to adapt to that environment and, as best as I could, accept it. I was lucky to have a loving family and many friends who showed me how much they cared. I encountered a wide variety of compassion in the medical professionals. Some were indifferent to me. Some were just too busy to have the time to show any compassion. Some were born to be in that profession. I was the patient and they left me in no doubt about it. Despite the fact that they were very busy, they still found the time to talk to me as a person - not as a patient. This is surely the greatest gift of all and the one to which I aspire. I have great compassion for those whose conditions leave them with little or no function but I have even greater compassion for those who have nobody in the world who cares for them. Surely this is the saddest situation of them all. We all need to be loved and to know that somebody cares irrespective of their relationship to us. As a society, how can we have come so far in so many ways and yet receeded so far where it really counts? I would rather be working in a run down hospital where every patient had at least one visitor who came to see them because they cared rather than a new hospital where patients languished anaesthetised by the effects of no love. I have just bought a pharmacy text-book laden with a plethora of weird and wonderful drugs but it seems to me that the most important drug of all is not listed.