December 2022

I’m running late with this month’s effort, but there are reasons for this tardiness. I’ve written before about my third grandson’s health problems: last month saw him in Athens twice, with the second trip involving an overnight stay. He bears these mini-ordeals very well, always with a book handy: his reading seems to get him through many a sticky moment in doctors’ waiting rooms and surgeries.  But now the sticky moments are coming far too fast for anybody’s liking.

I saw the three children on Sunday, and they were all in the pink. It was a fairly mild day, so they played outside for a while, and then returned home. 48 hours later O was admitted to Kalamata Hospital with pneumonia: this is not the first time he has had it, and a year ago he recovered quite well after five days. But yesterday he and his mother were taken by ambulance to the Athens Children’s Hospital, the Kalamata people having decided he needed to be where the best care is available in case his condition deteriorated.

I rang his mother this morning, and was upset to hear O coughing in the background: he is still on oxygen. Then there’s the antibiotic drip, in place while the experts try to find out which kind of pneumonia it is. But the physio came yesterday and will come again today. One good sign is that he is no longer running a temperature. So that is at least one indication of improvement.

Autumn has definitely ended. Wild weather, apparently coming from Italy, has been the story for at least a couple of weeks. Wind, rain, and thunderstorms. But the olive harvesters have carried on as usual, as they always do. In dry spells you can hear the sound of chain saws and the pattering of olives falling. Utility trucks zip up and down the streets, laden with tools. People complain of aching backs and blistered hands, and I have to admit I am glad I do not have to go through this annual business any more. Although of course I realise how essential it has always been, and still is.

I admit that I watch the BBC a great deal. For the news mainly, and I can’t say I’m pleased that so much of the news time is currently being given over to the World Cup. I’ve tried to take an interest in soccer for the sake of my three Eurocentric sons, but for me there is only one brand of football, and that is Australian Rules. However, it would be churlish to denigrate the achievement of the Socceroos in making it through to the all-important final sixteen. There have been quite a few upsets in this tournament, and my middle son suggests that many players are simply unused to playing in the heat. This could well be the case.

A BBC feature that I commend to everybody is HARDtalk, an interview session that usually stars Stephen Sackur, doyen of interviewers. Many of the great and the good have been on the programme, and this week it was the turn of Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor and writer. Her first career was in journalism, but at the age of 29 she began her medical studies, and began practising in 2009. During the interview, she explained that the brain surgeons and the heart surgeons are the rock stars of medicine, while palliative care practitioners are well down in the hierarchy.

Dr Clarke, whose much-loved father was a GP, explained that while life involves a great deal of loss, death is obviously the final example of it, and one that none of us can escape. Because of that fact, she believes that the patient must be put at the centre of the dying process. Death concentrates the mind, so that patients come to decide what it is they really care about. (In a newspaper article I read a few years ago, a reporter interviewed dying people about their regrets. A great many men regretted having spent so much time working.) Clarke asks her terminally ill patients what really matters to them, so that they can spend their remaining time wisely in this way. She is very concerned, she says, to empower patients. 

Her three books are:

Your Life in My Hands (about life as a trainee doctor)

Dear Life (about end of life experiences)

Breathtaking (about her work during the pandemic)

There is quite a lot about medicine in this piece. Not surprising, I suppose, under the circumstances. But I remind myself of the good news that O no longer has a temperature.