My wife is in the last summer vacation in her life for several days at present. She still goes to her office to make summaries of the patients. It is necessary to introduce the patients to other doctors.
Last night, when she came home, she uttered she would go on working for them. Half joking but still half serious. Summarizing a patinet's long history, mostly over 10 years or even longer than 20 years, she said, she sometimes realized what was the point for him/her and knew what was the better treatment for the case.
When I closed my business and turned it over to another pediatrician, I summed up the course of some patients, mostly of allergy or of asthma, in the record of chart. It was much simpler and shorter summaries than that of psychiatric histories. But I still found something important overlooked for the patients in that process.
It is up to her. But her age is a kind of critical point when she could not carry on her work. I felt she might be reading the chart of each patient in the same kind of deep emotion as Albrecht Goes described in his novel "Unruhige Nacht", which a militry service chaplain was going to attend the execution of death penalty for a deserted soldier in Ukraine during WWII. He was trying to read through the young soldier's life history in a night. I have introduced this touching novel in another post of this blog before. Of course, it is not the world of fiction that my wife's patients have lived. The process to grasp each one's life is still comparable to that novel.
She could have spent time to reflect how to deal with each case from time to time. But her usual work burden has been too hard for her, I guess. It is still good for her as well as for the patients that she could look back their histories and summarize them at this point of her life.
Coming home much earlier than usual, she has helped me cooking dinner last night. It was chicken and vegetables seasoned with sweetened vinegar. The potatoes were those harvested early in the summer.
When I told her I was glad to have a helper to cook meals and she might take the duty over from me, she instantly said "Let's go in half and half".
Still being in her summer vacation, she has left home for further summarizing work.
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