July 17, 2014 Thursday "Boney"

First Words

      …thoughts of an anachronistic, solo pediatrician

                    by Glenn Feole, M.D.

        "Be careful too that the reading of your story makes the melancholy 

        laugh and the merry laugh louder," Cervantes, Prologue to Don Quixote

Contact: ishmaelish36@gmail.com

Blog site: ishmaelish36.blogspot.com

July 13, 2014

Chief Complaint: (written on the chart before I go in the room)

     "Mother is concerned with her weight because she is boney."

Interesting Name:

     Tatherion 

Anecdote:

Gulf No. 3

Markel was a ten year old that I had worried about, and yet I hadn’t seen him in almost two years.   When I initially saw him, I had just started working at the clinic.  He was very poor, wearing tattered clothes that were frayed and dirty, his shoes were very worn, barely fitting his feet.  He was in very bad shape with several very raw, thickened areas of eczema on his feet and arms.  He was walking gingerly as he pulled off his old shoes, no socks on, to reveal his tender, oozing feet.  His swollen eyes were just slits, almost matted shut. To make matters worse, he softly complained of stabbing chest pain, which I think was from the worry and chronic state of inflammation he was in.  He was tired all the time.  He said that he had to lean against the wall at school often because of this, which he demonstrated for me in the office.  I was all ears and he responded by telling me all his problems.  

     I had him return to see me several times in quick succession and, finally, after several weeks with aggressive treatments with all kinds of lotions, antibiotics, oral steroids, various steroid creams, medicine for itching, and with much discussion about what to do to control his eczema…he was better.   I just couldn’t imagine the suffering he had gone through at home and at school with that terrible, painful diffuse eczema.

     Then he disappeared for two years. 

     Here he was in front of me now.  He was shy and often kept his eyes averted.  This hadn’t changed.  He still looked good and his eczema was under good control.  

     As I examined him today, he kept stealing glances at me.  At the end of the visit, he looked me right in the eye with his eyebrows knit together and said, “You’re …Dr. Feole… right?”  He had remembered all those years.  

     I said yes.  I wondered what he was going to say.  I knew he had appreciated how concerned I had been for him.  We had a bond.

    He said, “You look different.”

    I was interested, I have to admit.  I don’t know why but I asked him, “How do I look different?”

  “You had more hair.” 

          March, 2009  South Carolina

Poetry:

Coup d'essai:

PART XIX of XX: Migrant Health Care Journal, 2002

When I returned from this short lunch break, the first patient I saw at 2 p.m. was very kind to me.  She mentioned, as a passing fact, that she had been there since 8 a.m. waiting for an appointment.  She was not mad; she was thankful for the chance to see me she told me with a smile.  Her six year old son was very friendly and talkative.  He said that he and his mother were practicing sign language.  I asked him to teach me something and so he taught me to say, “Put a little love in your heart.”

9/19/02:  

      Thursdays are long days at the clinic: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and the patients pour in like waves from the sea, or like smoke billowing in from the surrounding tobacco fields.  They are adept at waiting, equanimity personified in their graceful, languid postures.  I had heard that they arrive several hours before 8 a.m. in order to get an appointment at the clinic.  I seem to keep asking my nurse/translator how to say “I’m sorry” in Spanish ("Lo siento"), which I repeat like a gentle mantra every ten minutes to these kind people.  

One ten year old white girl came in with palpitations of her heart.  She was not well kept but had a very pretty face.  She was brought in by her grandmother, a very thin, young and attractive looking older woman who still had that tobacco look: a deep brown complexion with hundreds of delicate furrows going down what used to be a very attractive face.  Her husband was obese, with the ubiquitous white stubble on his chin, but seemed kind to his grandchildren.  

     As I talked with the little girl, she opened up and told me that her mother’s boyfriend had been hitting and abusing her.  Her natural father was in prison in Florida she informed me in a matter of fact tone.  She kept asking me for medicine to help her sleep.  

     “How about listening to some nice, soft music on the radio before bed?”  

     “I don’t got a radio.”  

     “Take some deep breaths when you lying in bed.”  

     “I don’t got a bedroom either.”  

     "How about a walk before bed?"

     “We live in a trailer and there are snakes outside in the fields."  

     She then told me that she had been hearing voices both at night and during the day.  She would see a man come in her room and sit there and call her name.  She was frightened.  It took a couple of hours for me to get to talk with the social worker and then get DSS involved, but during this time I was able to draw pictures with her and play games and laugh.  I gave her a hug before she left with her grandmother.  She’ll come back to see me in a few weeks.  I’m understanding the concept of “grinding” poverty better and better.

Favorite Musician/song:

     Bill Evans,  "Everyone Digs Bill Evans"

    Exquisite.

Favorite Book/author:

Catherine deHueck Doherty "Diary of a Poor Woman"

One of my favorite spiritual books that I picked up at a men's Catholic retreat in Westport, Connecticut in the 1990's.  Little did I know what an impact it would make on my life.  I have poorer over her writings again and again.  They have the same purity and compassion that is present in Mother Teresa's words.  I life devoted to helping the poor; a life of love.

Favorite Movie/DVD:

Children of Paradise

    An Iranian film and a work of great beauty and love…brother and sister as he scarifies to win back her shoes that he has lost…Father and son.  One of my all-time favorites.