From the Eye of the Storm

One of the fringe benefits of research and writing is that I get to stumble across wonderful articles and books I would never encounter in "normal" life.  Here is one of those articles, entitled "From the Eye of the Storm, with the Eyes of a Physician" by Hacib Aoun.  You can read a facsimile of the article at

 http://rethinkingaids.com/portals/0/TheCD/A/aou2.pdf.

This article is adapted from the eleventh annual David Rabin Memorial Lecture at Vanderbilt University.  Aoun is a physician who contracted HIV-AIDS as a result of an accident with a capillary tube of blood  It took a few years, but that encounter lead to the development of HIV-AIDS and related symptoms.  More than that, it gave Aoun the "opportunity" to experience physician care as a patient.

I was particularly taken by the author's words about hope for those who cannot be cured.  "In cases without easy answers or for which no effective therapy is available," Aoun wrote, "even the simple feeling on the part of the patient that the physician is doing all that is possible has an important therapeutic effect."

The article took me back to those ten days in the Intensive Care Unit on 6-North at BLGH-East.  It was clear from the first MRI that there would be no real recovery for Anne.  The lesion in her mid-brain--the size of a quarter--was definitive and probably deadly.  So what was to be done?  One physician later that first day put it bluntly.  "There is no hope of recovery," he said.  "The kindest thing you can do is to end this now."  

Of course, he was correct in his diagnosis.  He was completely wrong in his care.

"A good doctor goes through the struggle of an illness with you," Aoun writes, "providing support while protecting your dignity and independence, and searches constantly for better options for your care."  In contrast was another of the specialists who visited us several times a day.  He too noted that the prognosis was grim.  Then he made a diagnosis of those who loved Anne.  He agreed that we had to try everything first.

"It's true." he said, "Where there is life there is hope."  Whether his personal faith as a Christian informed his clinical practice, I cannot tell.  He did, however, choose to see us as people first and to walk with us in our campaign to reach Anne, even if that connection was at the most rudimentary and primitive level.

"Hope is the one thing," Aoun reminds his colleagues, "that even if we cannot push ourselves as physicians to provide, we should at the very least not deny.  To most patients with grave afflictions, hope is the only fuel that keeps them going."  That is true for the loved ones of the patient as well.  

The die was cast for Anne long before we were aware enough to take any real action.  For those of us who would continue this life without her, we needed to know that we had pursued medical hope to the final conclusions.  Then we could relinquish her to the hope that does not disappoint us.

Getting and giving help is one of the elements of this method of life called hope.  We were fortunate to have a number of physicians and nurses willing to walk with us on the journey, even though they knew the outcome was virtually certainly and certainly grim.  We had folks with us who fit Aoun's description of the good physician.  That physician is one who will say, "I understand that this illness is happening to you, but we will face it together."

After some time has passed, I see that this is what it means to be a good pastor as well.  The advantage we pastors have, of course, is the privilege to point beyond the limits of this life and to declare the hope that lives beyond this life and defeats Death itself.

We pastors get to preach and teach and care from the eye of the storm with the eyes of the Great Physician.