Stuart's story

Stuart - 1997

What can I say - I'm loving revisiting my old clients for you - happy memories and their voices come through their reviews in my head making me smile and feel a warming in my heart and head. 

Stuart was a young medical student facing those clinical years where he was having to face up to having the huge responsibility for the care of people who come to A&E and was keen to make light of it through the usual dark humour and jokes that was the habit of young medics. 

He had basically scared many people before hand and his family were a little concerned he might be unsuited to medicine - they were a lovely family, but not medics, so they didn't get his recent humour! He had also taken up rock climbing and going out in the middle of winter regardless of the weather forecast - claiming that the worse it was the better it was - which had his mum having nightmares. Poor mum, I didn't recognise that at the time as I was not far off his age and hadn't made that move into recognising maternal worry! (I said in previous articles about learning something really important in many cases - this was the start of my awareness of the way that mums' worry and a bit more patience and understanding of my own mum and how I'd obviously driven her up the wall too! :) ) 

I enjoy working with young (or indeed older) medics because it was a humour and dinner table stories that I was brought up on, so Stuart soon found that he couldn't budge me by making jokes or comments, by avoiding me through trying to scare me, shock me or put me off (lol I did the Prof's forensic medicine course where they had benches outside the room for the fainters - a fact I did eventually tell Stuart, but it was amusing watching him using this technique to keep me at arms length and to continue his avoidance of the real subject) 

He's right in his review - he wriggled and tried everything to avoid the topic and tried to put me off by shock techniques and his complete lack of care or concern for his own life in the face of the deaths and dying that he was seeing for the first time every day. His coping mechanism wasn't working though as he was an amazingly deep and caring person who'd worked long and hard to get where he wanted to be and was facing the induction of the Junior House Officer in one of the worst A&Es in the country at the time. It was a huge shock to his system, not just medically, but culturally as well and the disappearing and not caring about life anymore was an easy option for him. 

Every so often I hear from him - or about him - the medical world isn't so big and I still have a fair number of friends and relations in it - the quick notes he sends are sweet, kind and compassionate as he always was - but the stories I hear from others are amazing - he's a fantastic and brilliant surgeon, still linked to doing the best work he can - he's been out with a number of charities to frontlines working in the most traumatic cases - and the thing that always shines through is his ability to cope with everything, to keep everyone else's spirits up - and to be empathetic and caring to patients, especially those who are dying. 

So yes, working with me doesn't always get you to avoid the reason you're coming - but it does get you to process your thoughts and feelings and come out through it.