The people we meet are impressive sometimes. I remember the first time we met my ‘Zen’ oncologist as my partner and I called him for his serene manner. I tentatively sat in the waiting room filled with his European holiday photographs and watched the door open. A woman with a silk pink scarf wrapped around her head walked out of his room saying thank you. She stood at the counter and waited to pay and looked happy. That gave me the reassurance I needed so when my name was called, I wasn’t afraid to enter his room.
Dr Leong greeted my partner and I and we sat opposite him at the big desk. He acknowledged the surgeon’s expertise given the fact I was able to walk in a week after having a large cancer tumour removed from my bowel.
I acknowledged the surgeon’s work and said, ‘Dr Davis is my hero’.
‘My patients are my heroes.’ Dr Leong surprised me with this immediate reply.
He told me I’d be starting six months of chemotherapy.
He said, ‘I’ve had grown men cowering in the corner like a scared mouse when I tell them this news, but you aren’t.’
I’d already accepted this course of treatment was inevitable a few days previously when behind a hospital curtain, I quietly cried.
‘Nothing sinister,’ he told me a few months later about the result of a scan midway through treatment and confessed only when I came in for my five years in remission check-up that he had been very worried for me at the time.
As our final meeting was coming to an end he asked and answered, ‘You’re grateful every day, right?’
Yes’, I agreed.
He added, ‘You’re flourishing, not floundering.’
This line took on new meaning when I found out this amazing 56-year-old man whose 30-year journey of helping very sick and stressed people had ended in suicide.
I worked in the garden until I was physically spent and exhausted to process the loss of this wonderful person who had supported me.
I wrote this song because I continue to live and wish to acknowledge that the sacrifice this man made of his life has not gone unnoticed. Dr David Leong and all the doctors and nurses whose lives are spent helping many cancer patients are challenged every day and I thank them for their service.
Song narrative for Wise Trees, Track 1 from Field of a String
