In Practice: The Doctor's Wife

Sayantani DasGupta
Hastings Cent Rep.

My husband brings his work home. Had he been a butcher, it might have been a prime cut of steak; a mason, a block of limestone. The newspaper reporter brings home fingers covered in ink, and the fishmonger, the smell of the sea. But my husband is an oncologist, so he brings home the dead and dying.
This makes our king-size bed rather crowded. The children, padding into the room after midnight on footie-pajamaed feet to cuddle beside us, are unaware of who is already there between their parents: a bald thirty-three year old who will never be a mother, a grieving widow who turned her anger against her husband's doctor rather than his horrible disease, a beloved grandfather whose cancer has metastasized to every far-reaching corner of his body. My husband's patients hog the blankets, steal my pillow, shake the mattress with their sobs.
Over the sleeping body of our curly-haired daughter, my husband and I watch the television pundits discuss the war in Iraq, then a human interest story about the young men and women, not really that much older than our own babies, who carry guns, drive tanks, watch their comrades suffer and die. We stare at the screen in silence, together and apart, fixed on images of young bodies killing and being killed.
Even on returning home, some soldiers can never be the same. Violent memories linger, recurring like tumors. After so much blood, some soldiers become dry and still like stones.
"The only difference," my husband finally says, "is that those soldiers see death like a flash—quick and fierce and chaotic." With his index finger, he gently traces the baby's slightly parted lips—a perfect cupid's bow. Then he looks away. "I watch people die in slow motion."
In medical school, they called us marines. Osler marines, to be precise, after the venerable Dr. William, who, so they say, was a general of a man. We were in the trenches, on the front lines, soldiering on. Antibiotics bombed infections, diligent docs were gunners, and incoming patients were middle of the night hits to be avoided.
It was no time to be at war with metaphor. Metaphor was at war with us, and winning by a big margin.
In our white-coated uniforms, our scrub suit camouflage, we were the measly privates of the operation being taught the ways of battle. We were given rounds of bullets with names like distance, objectivity, and self-preservation. Any other kind of medical practice was strictly on a don't ask, don't tell basis.
So we huddled together for warmth in the fox holes of training. In the field, almost a dozen couples were born—all fair in love and war—among them, my husband and I.
"Medicine makes a jealous mistress," our teachers told us laughingly, even as our dean earnestly recommended that I reconsider obstetrics for pediatrics, a field more suited to family life and what is, after all, a military marriage.
What is it to witness continuous suffering? What is it to continuously witness suffering? Emmanuel Levinas posited that the ethical work of medicine lies in this act of witnessing—of seeing the Other's face, answering the call of another's suffering.[1] But what philosopher can account for the weight of suffering—not only upon those who suffer, but upon those who stand beside suffering? What is the cost of ethical practice? What is the responsibility of those who witness the experience of witnesses?
Historically, medicine recognized the need for physicians to be witnessed even as they were witnessing their patients. In part, this need was satisfied by the Hegelian sense of recognition, whereby the gift of recognition was returned: patients could engage with and recognize the humanity of their doctor, who in turn engaged with and recognized theirs.[2] This sort of medicine provided other avenues for recognition as well, in local communities in which physicians lived, practiced, and enjoyed special status, and in families in which (male) physicians' (female) partners provided unconditional love and support.
The increasing impersonalization of medicine takes a toll on the ability of physicians to practice ethical medicine—medicine in which they not only diagnose but see their patients. This is due not only to shortened visit times, increased patient loads, and a reliance on technological data over interpersonal interaction, but to a disintegration of avenues whereby physicians are themselves seen. The loss of support communities around the witnesses to suffering and the lack of social or professional recognition of the toll of witnessing leaves the burden upon relatively isolated spouses. And doctor's wives aren't all what they used to be.
My husband is not yet forty, but he is bowed over like an old man from all the bodies on his back. He carries his patient's stories with him like comrades who have fallen in the field, unable to put them to rest. He mulls and worries about even the ones who make it, cherishing their cards and gifts the way I cherish our children's finger paintings, their construction paper artwork.
"You're like the son we never had, doctor," I overhear an elderly patient say to him one day, beaming and patting him on the cheek. Like I don't have enough demanding in-laws, I think.
Perhaps I wouldn't be so resentful if it were at least sufficient. But even such a loving gesture cannot outweigh the burden of so many patients, so much suffering and loss. Or perhaps it could be enough if he had a moment to sit with her and let her generosity wash over him. But the charts pile up on his door—the one with a deforming tumor, the one with interminable questions from the Internet, the one drowning in sorrow and confusion.
Or is the problem that I am a doctor too and can't muster a sufficient sense of awe about my husband's work? The realization lies heavy in my stomach.
"I saw him first," I want to tell them all.
It is a holy practice—or so my friend, another doctor's wife, likes to say, especially those nights her husband doesn't come back until long after she has gone to bed. "It is God's work," she tells me firmly, when my voice trembles from frustration; when I ask questions about when and why and is it fair. She is a banker and hates her job. She swallows her spouse's sorrows with her own.
I tell her the story of Psyche, who was forbidden to look upon her beloved, Cupid—whose only encounters with him were in the dark. One night, tormented by the need to see, she holds aloft an oil lamp and illuminates his sleeping form. She is so overcome by the beauty of his face that she spills hot oil on his shoulder. Startled awake and realizing her betrayal, her injured husband stretches his wings and flies away, leaving her quite alone.
"Peek-a-boo," my friend says, to no one in particular.
After the news program, I decide to read aloud Raymond Carver's poem, "The Autopsy Room." I read it instead of stroking my husband's hair, or asking him to tell me—please tell me. I have tried these tacks. Our daughter still slumbers between us, mewing and twitching—I cannot guess what she's dreaming about either.
I read the poem because it's about a husband who has witnessed too much and a wife who tries to understand. The young man is not a doctor, but cleans a morgue where bodies and body parts are at times left on the coroner's table. Among them:
. . . A little baby,still as stone and snow cold, . . .a huge black man with white hair whose chest had been laid open, . . .a pale and shapely leg.[3]
My husband listens, silent and immobile. For a moment, I wonder if he is sleeping with his eyes open.
Once home, Carver's narrator is paralyzed—quaking like those first anatomists—because he has been to the forbidden temple, he has entered the Medusa's cave, he has seen. He stares at the ceiling, the floor. But then his wife takes his hand to her breast, saying,
"Sugar, it's going to be all right. We'll trade in this life for another."[4]
His fingers stray to her leg, which is alive, warm, and willing. But he remains in limbo, between this world and the next, unable to return to the shores of the living.
"I'm Charon the ferryman," my husband finally says, breaking his silence. "I'm a shaman to the spirit-world."
Our daughter turns over in her sleep, fitful.
With my words and images, I will weave a yellow ribbon of remembrance and tie it around our bedpost—a beacon home for my beloved.
. . . Nothing was happening. Everything was happening.[5]
I see you, I try to say, but my voice trips and stumbles.
. . . Life was a stone, grinding and sharpening.[6]