Epilogue
She Was Mine, Now She Is His
I didn’t want to read the autopsy report. Nor did I go to the clinicopathological conference about her death, held a few weeks later in one of the large hospitals in the center. It was too much for me. David went in my place.
When he called me right after the meeting, he asked if we could meet at the cemetery, by Lily’s grave.
“Bastards! Bastards!” I shouted, tears flooding my eyes. “I asked them to check all the possibilities of uterine bleeding, and that simple thing – that she had a fibroid – they missed. I don’t believe you. She bled to death from a fibroid?”
“That’s what the pathologists said. But don’t forget…”
“David, I don’t forget anything.”
David knew I had asked them to check whether Lily had uterine bleeding, and that they told me in their way not to interfere!
To behave like a husband, not like a doctor!
Of course I obeyed, like a good boy. And what did they do?
Acted like fools! True, she also had another illness, but the drop in hemoglobin could have come on top of the other illness and caused her death.
And who knows – maybe somewhere in the world, there was a drug for her underlying disease. Maybe. But now it was too late.
Unfortunately, the doctors were prisoners of their own preconceptions, convinced she had only one illness, and refused to consider otherwise.
They were sure the bleeding came from her vascular disease, that damned autoimmune disease.
It is known – we always look for one illness, at most a syndrome, a cluster of signs.
But I never imagined they could make such a basic mistake.
Who decided a person can only have one illness? There can always be another.
“Now it’s too late,” David murmured softly, as he hugged me.
“You’re telling me? I’m already past that.” I rose and placed one hand on Lily’s tombstone.
“I see.”
“There, I won’t go back there.” I pointed with my other hand toward an imaginary hospital. David understood.
Before we left, I placed a small stone on her grave. From that day on, I never returned to a hospital as a doctor.
I completed the IDF programming course, which distracted me from the agony that filled me during the first months after her death.
At the end of the course, I was torn between the sense of failure to save Lily – which darkened my life – and my desire to be a doctor and prove to myself and others that I had overcome my disappointment with the medical system, perhaps even to change something in it, out of the immense grief that engulfed me.
I went to my parents’ home day after day, trying to take comfort among my family.
But without realizing it, I had begun to cough obsessively, to such an extent that my mother demanded I seek treatment.
My brother, the doctor, and I both knew this was a psychological reaction to the trauma of Lily’s death.
We both knew I couldn’t go back to the hospital as a doctor, to deal with medical issues that would forever engrave her death in my soul.
The decision to leave medicine was one of the hardest of my life.
In the conversation where I informed the Surgeon General of my decision to retire from medicine, he answered: “You can leave medicine, but medicine will not leave you. Always, always, you will be a doctor. That no one can take from you.”
And he was indeed right. One doesn’t have to stand at a patient’s bedside to use the extraordinary tools gained in medical school – tools of immeasurable worth.
For me, a human being will always be a human being, and at every opportunity I have had, I have given of myself unstintingly.
My family, my friends, and many of those I treated can attest to that.
I practiced what I learned at the patients’ bedside in my undertakings.
I combined the tools I was born with and those I received at medical school, irreplaceable and irrevocable.
And yet, as I searched for a solution day after day, I wandered into other fields as well. In the end, I found myself engaging with therapeutic areas still connected to medicine, but ones in which no fateful decisions of life and death were required. I could always say: I have been there already.
For years, I tried unsuccessfully to reproduce the thud I heard that fatal night – the thud from her fall onto the toilet. That was the last sound Lily ever heard. For her, it was the voice of death.
If anyone had seen me in the bathroom after her death, they would surely have thought me insane. There, behind the door, I got into the crouched position in which I had found her. At first, I shed tears, then the sea of tears dried up.
Forever.
I stopped doing it with the birth of my first daughter, about five years later.
God’s masterpiece, who gave me a “ride for life” years ago, departed from life minutes before reaching the threshold of hope.
A victim of a “preconception”? Perhaps.
I have never been able to free myself from that possibility – or from the command, “Don’t be her doctor, be her husband.” I probably never will.
The doctors had given her two years.
The power of love, and her fierce desire to live, granted her two more vibrant years.
In the end, her death came not from the illness itself, but from a moment’s misjudgment, and a tender defiance of the medical limits imposed upon her.
I can only assume that He, the very One she did not believe in, wanted her by His side. Lily was mine and now she is His!