Reasons To Let Go

My colleague was away so I saw him. He was her regular patient. A simple man in his late 60s. He told me about a lump that he felt in his left side under his ribs. He had been examined a few months earlier and nothing had been found. I sent him for a scan and of course it was cancer. On our second appointment I had to break the bad news. I told him about the cancer and his reaction was to tell me what his father had done to him when he was a child. All the abuse and all the pain. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying, words were coming out differently when he was sobbing.

I had to leave that practice soon after those two consults for some personal reasons. I don’t know what happened to him. But I still think about him. His anguished voice, his tears. Cancer was an excuse to cry for himself, for his lost childhood, for how this world is unfair.