Last weekend, I talked to a patient about her father, and a father about his daughter. They are one and the same. We’ve walked only a short path together, but I’ve watched her blossom because of him, and him because of her. She’s not ready for him to die, because she doesn’t think there will ever be a time that she is okay.

I didn’t tell him, though I wanted to, that when he died, she would be okay. I didn’t tell him, but I knew that his love for her would be what would make it okay. I didn’t tell him I knew it would be okay because in another world, I am the daughter with the dying but not yet dead dad.

The similarities of our stories are not lost on me.

It was 2020. We were in lockdown, but as essential workers we still had to go to work as GPs. Telehealth was how we conducted most of our consults. If you needed an examination, we gave you permission to come in.

She was in her 40s. She called complaining of back pain. She always had back pain. She was a busy mum of three. She never had time to rest. But this time the pain felt different. It wasn’t going away; it was constant, gnawing. I had never met her before, but something in her voice felt unusually worried. I felt the urge to call her in.

She eventually attended with two young kids in tow. She didn’t have a choice. I had to overlook the social distancing rules to have them all in the room. It was the only way she could attend. She looked pale and tired. Was she normally this pale? Or anaemic? I took a further history and found out she had been spotting constantly. “Isn’t that just a side effect of the Implanon though?” she thought out loud.

I saw that she was overdue for her cervical screening, and as a dutiful GP registrar I performed a speculum examination.

I couldn’t describe what I saw where her cervix was meant to be. It was a fungating, bleeding mass that distorted the normal anatomy. In my alarm and haste, I quickly took a sample, commented on how there was contact bleeding and things didn’t look normal, and sent her on her way with a blood test and a CT scan of her lower back.

As a bewildered and naive first-year registrar, I discussed what I saw with my GP supervisor. “Should I wait for the results first?” But no, I was told to immediately call the gynaecology registrar on call at the nearest tertiary hospital and discuss the case.

She was seen within the same week. Biopsies came back as metastatic adenocarcinoma of the cervix. The back pain was a bony metastasis. Her haemoglobin was in the 60s. She must have been bleeding constantly. She must have been so tired. But she probably brushed it aside for so long, putting her kids and family first.

It was too late for anything to work. She left behind three kids and a husband in less than a year.

I reflect on this case often. What if I had also brushed off her back pain over the phone? What if she had never come in? What was it that compelled me to call her in? Could we have prevented it all earlier had she not been years overdue for her cervical screening?

I work hard now to not brush off any complaints. To create a space for my patients where there are no questions too silly or symptoms too small to bring up. To listen and investigate appropriately, and to trust my gut and seek a second opinion if something doesn’t feel right. Because sometimes when we hear hooves, we will find a zebra.

Whenever I diagnose cancer, I see a litany of ghosts in the room. Some of them are still on this mortal plane, but the echo of their memory, their spiritual form at the crossroads of life, appears before me.

The ghost of my brother in his 30s.
The ghost of my father in his 40s.
The ghost of my mother in her 40s.
The ghost of both my grandfathers.

The ghost of the first cancer I diagnosed as a GP.
The ghost of my first patient who died from cancer, five years on from her diagnosis, one I made because something was off about her reflux and I just couldn’t shake it.

It’s so close to home, as you would have gathered.

I live at peace with these ghosts. They haunt me only with the beauty of compassion and lessons learnt. Empathy and condolences, shared experience to a degree, and above all a reminder that to age is an honour. What a privilege it is.

I work in a private billing practice, but I bulk bill anyone with a cancer. I can’t bring myself to charge them. Or perhaps my otherworldly collective conscience reminds me to have compassion and patience above pay.

I wish it were simple, to see all these ghosts in the room. It is heavy, to see them all in the room, adding another to their midst. A new ghost.

But there will not be a séance or a sage-ing any time soon.

He was in his late eighties, a farmer, and still one of the strongest men who walked through my door. He had more diagnoses than most people collect in a lifetime, and he carried them the way he must have carried everything on that land: without fuss.

He never came alone. His son brought him every time, ran every part of his care, the appointments, the medications, the specialist letters, and did it not as a duty but as something closer to devotion. His father was plainly his hero, and had been for a very long time. Whatever the two of them had between them, they had been building it for decades. Seeing them together was one of the quietly good parts of my week, even on the days the medicine was hard.

Then I left that practice. Nearly ten years in a country town, and I walked out with nothing but memories: the pregnancies I’d followed through to birth, the bad news I’d had to deliver, the grief I’d sat in rooms with, the ordinary Tuesdays in between. You don’t realise how far into people’s lives you’ve been let until you have to step back out of them. It was a strange kind of loss, and I didn’t have a name for it.

Five years later, the phone rang. A hospital coordinator. A man had been trying, quite desperately, to find me, she said. She gave me a name and a number. I knew the name straight away.

It was the son. I rang him back expecting, I don’t know what. A question. A complaint. Something he needed from me.

He wanted to tell me his father had died.

That was all. He had spent a long time tracking me down to say that one thing. He thanked me for the years I’d looked after his dad, and then the call was over. I think it was the last piece of something he needed to finish, as if his father’s story couldn’t quite be closed until his old GP knew.

I’ve sat with that for a long time since. We assume we’re forgotten the moment we leave. We aren’t. Somewhere out there, people are still carrying consults we stopped thinking about years ago, and carrying them kindly. We may never see it. It’s there anyway.

It changed how I walk into every consultation. Not just another patient, not just another fifteen minutes. The little good we put in goes a very long way, further than I’d ever let myself believe.

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..

The first time he walked into my room, I don’t think he trusted me. A big man in his late seventies — a Vietnam veteran, the kind who filled a doorway — and me, a young doctor with an accent and a face that didn’t look like his. He’d come in for repeat scripts. A transplant, and a list of medications long enough that I read it twice. Then I learned he was living in a tent with his wife. A bushfire had taken their house and everything in it. He hadn’t been planning to mention any of that.

Somehow, we became something like friends. He learned my parents’ names. He asked after them every visit, and remembered the answers.

Then a lump, and a scan, and a diagnosis that didn’t respond to anything. The day he got his verdict, he came straight from the oncologist, sat down, and asked about my family first. Eventually I couldn’t wait any longer. I asked him what the specialist had said.

He smiled. “He told me I don’t need to buy any more clothes for myself.”

Less than six months. And even then he was careful with me — he didn’t want to be the one handing me bad news.

That was him, all the way to the end. He never complained, even at his frailest, even in pain that kept him up most of the night — I’d only learn of it if his wife told me, or if I pressed. He downplayed everything. His pain was his, and he made sure it never landed on anyone else — not his wife, not the clinic staff, not me.

He was protecting his own doctor from his own dying. I don’t think I’ve ever fully taken the measure of a heart like that.

He asked me for one thing only, and he asked it gently: that when the time came, I wouldn’t let him be in pain. I kept that promise as well as medicine allowed. He went sooner than they said. That was more than a decade ago. I still think about him. Some patients don’t end when they die.

I was an RMO when I first encountered him.

He was an inpatient with schizophrenia and several other mental health conditions. I was sent to the ward to review him, as junior doctors do. I had a list of things I needed to accomplish: take a history, perform an examination, assess his mental state, document my findings and move on to the next patient.

He was not interested.

He was guarded and passive-aggressive. He did not want to talk to me. He did not want me examining him. He barely wanted to acknowledge that I was there.

I remember trying to do what I had been trained to do. Ask the questions. Build rapport. Understand what was happening. Find out what he was experiencing.

Then, in a moment of clarity, he looked at me and said:

“You don’t even have psychosis. You don’t even hear voices. How would you know how I feel? You can’t even empathise with me. What’s the point? Go away.”

I was completely taken aback.

I had no clever response. No reassuring phrase. No piece of medical knowledge that could answer him.

I couldn’t tell him that I understood what hearing voices felt like, because I didn’t.

I couldn’t tell him that I knew what it was like to experience the world through psychosis, because I didn’t.

So I hesitated.

He saw it immediately.

“See? So go away.”

And I did.

Years passed.

I entered GP training through the AGPT pathway. I sat my exams. I completed my training. I saw thousands of patients with problems I had never personally experienced.

And eventually, I became a Fellow of the RACGP.

But that sentence never quite left me.

For years, I carried it.

It took me becoming a more experienced clinician to understand something that I could not have understood as that junior doctor.

He was right about one thing.

I had never experienced psychosis.

I still haven’t.

I don’t know what it is like to hear a voice that nobody else can hear. I don’t know what it is like to have your perception of reality disrupted by an illness that everyone around you tells you isn’t real.

But he was wrong about what that meant.

If I had to personally experience every illness before I could understand and treat it, I would be a very poor doctor.

I have never had appendicitis, yet I can recognise it.

I have never passed a renal stone, yet I can diagnose and manage renal colic.

I have never experienced rheumatoid arthritis, yet I can recognise the pattern of inflammatory arthritis and know when someone needs treatment and specialist care.

I have never experienced sepsis, thyroid disease, heart failure, cancer or any of the countless other conditions that I diagnose and treat.

Medicine would be impossible if experience were the prerequisite for understanding.

And that, eventually, became the lesson I carried from that encounter.

Empathy does not always mean saying, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Sometimes it means being honest enough to say, “I don’t know what this feels like for you.”

And then being curious enough to listen.

Knowledge can tell us what a disease does to the body. Training can teach us how to recognise it. Experience can teach us how to manage it.

But none of those things gives us the right to assume that we completely understand another person’s experience.

The job is not to have lived every life.

The job is to meet people where they are, recognise what we can, acknowledge what we cannot, and still care enough to walk alongside them.

That patient probably never knew what his words left behind in me.

He probably never knew that a sentence he threw at a junior doctor in frustration would stay with that doctor for years.

But I carried it.

Through medical training.

Through exams.

Through thousands of consultations.

All the way to Fellowship.

And perhaps that is one of the strange things about being a doctor.

We spend years learning how to diagnose and treat disease, while quietly accumulating fragments of the people who taught us how little we truly know about what it is like to live with it.

Some of those fragments are heavy.

But sometimes, if we carry them long enough, we realise they were not stones after all.

They were lessons.

And perhaps the deepest lesson he gave me was this:

You do not have to experience someone’s suffering to understand that it is real.

You just have to be willing to listen.

What do we carry as GPs? Not just a stethoscope, a clinical bag, or the weight of a busy day. We carry fragments of people’s lives. Sometimes, we carry a patient long after they have left our consulting room. It was an ordinary day, some years ago. I was performing a skin procedure. In the cubicle next to me, a two-year-old girl—a regular patient of another GP—was having a dressing changed for recurrent burns. She was crying while a young nurse tried to comfort her. After finishing my procedure, I went over to support the nurse and offered the little girl a lollipop. A tiny gesture. But it became the beginning of a friendship. She returned every week for another dressing. I was not her GP, yet somehow I became her “lollipop GP.” Sometimes Mum brought her. Sometimes Dad did. Then a question began to follow me: Why was this little child being burned so often? I spoke with the nurse and her regular GP. During one visit, I gently asked Dad about the recurrent injuries. I learned he was her stepfather. He explained that she loved playing in an inflatable pool and that this was causing the burns. The explanation was plausible. Yet something in me remained unsettled. Then I went on vacation. When I returned, she was missing. What followed was devastating. The little girl had been the victim of homicide. Years later, I still remember her face. And the lollipop. For years, I wondered whether I could have done more. Eventually, I realised I had a choice: carry her as guilt, or carry her as a lesson. I chose the lesson. That lesson has become something I now teach my registrars: Know the relationship of whoever accompanies your patient. Don’t simply record “mother,” “father,” “partner,” or “friend.” Pause. Ask yourself: Why are they here? Are they here for support? For accompaniment? To help communicate? Or are they answering questions that the patient should be answering themselves? It is not about suspicion. It is about professional curiosity. A repeated injury. An inconsistent story. A sudden change in behaviour. A child’s silence. A relationship that feels uncomfortable. None of these, alone, proves anything. But they may be the loose thread that deserves gentle attention. As GPs, we often encounter people in the ordinary moments of their lives. Sometimes, hidden within an ordinary consultation, is an extraordinary story. We may be the person who notices the detail everyone else walked past. That is our third eye. Not paranoia. Not judgement. Just awareness. I never stopped being the lollipop GP. But I became a more observant one. And I still tell this story—not to create fear, but to remind us of the privilege and responsibility of general practice. Look beyond the diagnosis. Listen beyond the words. Understand the relationships. Ask the extra question. Because sometimes, the smallest observation can become the difference between simply treating a patient and protecting a life. Some patients leave our consulting rooms. Some become part of our conscience. And some remain with us for a lifetime. That is what we carry.

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.