CLAMORING FOR ATTENTION
For the first week that I knew Alice Thorner I hardly laid eyes on her face. That’s because it was always buried in her hands.
Alice was a new patient, a 62 year old homemaker with silver hair and an average build. I believe her eyes were blue, but I could scarcely get a glimpse of them. She had little in the way of past medical problems, but she had gone downhill over the last four months. As I tried to dig into her history, I got nowhere. She sat, bent almost double, cradling her head and rocking in anguish, while her husband did all the talking for her.
He related a host of vague symptoms, including headaches, difficulty swallowing, nausea, weight loss, and numbness of the feet. She herself seemed so withdrawn that I began to suspect her underlying issue was depression. After all, though obviously miserable, she was not badly underweight and had a normal examination with no objective signs of disease that I could uncover. Furthermore, her routine blood work was perfect.
Unsure of how best to help her, I inwardly weighed the options of simply trying some medication to relieve her symptoms versus admitting her to the hospital for a major evaluation. Perhaps she sensed my uncertainty, because for the first time she looked up, made fleeting eye contact with me (yes, her eyes were blue), then weakly slipped something into my hand.
The sight of this tiny object hit me like a karate chop. Instantly I knew that this poor lady was indeed seriously ill, and I must do everything in my power to help her.