Be My Permanent GP, and Be With Me Until I Die

When I first started my medical career in Australia, in a small rural town, I met a 70-year-old lady who had once been a nurse herself. She lived alone.

She came to see me with a cough. As I investigated her symptoms, we discovered that she had lung cancer.

She chose not to have medical or surgical treatment. Her wish was simple: she wanted to live the rest of her life as comfortably and pain-free as possible.

But there was something else she asked of me.

“Be my permanent GP, and be with me until I die.”

Those words have stayed with me ever since.

For the next 18 months, I had the privilege of caring for her. Somewhere along the way, she stopped being just a patient to me. She became someone who had a very special place in my heart.

One day, during one of her follow-ups, she told me that she hardly had an appetite anymore, but she was craving spicy food.

So I cooked some my asian spicy food for her.

From then on, whenever she came for her appointments, I would bring her a little food pack that I had prepared for her. Sometimes I brought her flowers too. They were small things, but they were my way of saying, “You are not alone. Someone cares about you.”

She had a very strong faith in Jesus, and that faith gave her enormous strength throughout her illness.

As the weeks passed, she became weaker. Eventually, she moved into a nursing home close to my practice. Although visiting her was no longer part of my normal duties, I found myself going there frequently.

Sometimes I would simply sit beside her, hold her hand and talk to her.

There was no medical procedure to perform. No investigation to order. No treatment to change the course of her disease.

Sometimes, all I could give her was my presence.

And perhaps, sometimes, that is what a patient needs most.

I remember one of my last visits to her. I was getting ready to leave after sitting with her for a while. As I stood beside her, I said, “God bless you.”

She looked at me and said something I will never forget:

“God is surely blessing me. That is why He gave me an angel like you.”

I don’t think she ever realised what those words meant to me.

She passed away the day after my birthday.

I was able to care for her for 18 months, right until the end.

Years may pass, patients may come and go, and so much of medicine may eventually become a blur of consultations, diagnoses, prescriptions and paperwork.

But some patients never leave you.

She is one of them.

She taught me that being a doctor is not always about curing a disease. Sometimes, when we cannot cure, we can still comfort. When we cannot change the outcome, we can still walk beside someone. And when medicine has little more to offer, our presence, our kindness and simply holding a patient’s hand can still mean everything.

She chose to live her final days without aggressive treatment, but she did not choose to face them alone.

And I feel deeply privileged that, for those 18 months, she allowed me to walk beside her.

She was my patient.

But she was also one of the people who taught me what a big healing can be done by just being present..