The Good Doctor

Last night the Little Shelford annual bookclub meeting was held at the Olde Post Office. We rang the bell (like Pooh does outside Owl's), and sat down in a circle beside the authoress of A Glimpse of Eternal Snows: A Family's Journey of Love and Loss in Nepal. The book had circled the members last year while I was in hospital, and one of the lovely ladies had mentioned that perhaps Mum might find it difficult to read at the time, so it had simply passed us by.

Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth is charming and self-effacing, the kind of doctor a patient is fortunate to encounter. She is author of several books in different genres, but this, her autobiographical work, delves into the heart of a painful dilemma - to submit to the admonitions and gloomy prognostications of her fellow Cambridge doctors, or abandon the Western view and offer her son David a cheerful and dignified chance at life.  Here is an excerpt in Dr Jane's words... 

The one sympathetic hospital doctor in Cambridge had advised us to treat David normally and we took this as a licence to take him on his first trek; at the age of four months, we packed up David’s heart medicines and tubes and headed up over precipitous drops and wobbly rope bridges to explore drippy forests and medieval hill-forts. The mountains were spectacular and healing. Strangely David’s heart disease protected him from the effects of high altitude. Our arrival in each mountain village was heralded by choruses of, ‘Children have come!’ We’d be surrounded and David taken from his carrying basket to be handed around for all to cuddle. He glowed in all this attention. He smiled and burbled appreciatively at all his admirers. Nepalis helped us see David’s qualities and talent for laughter.

It was interesting as you can imagine, thinking about my long journeys down the very same corridors of this very Cambridge hospital. I told Dr Jane that I don't write about my experiences with doctors (well, except the blue-eyed surgeon of course). She wondered why not. Perhaps I might, now. Particularly the good doctors. They deserve to be honoured, as human beings more than anything else.