Living with Motor Neurone Disease: “Where there is life, there is hope”

 There's an old Yiddish saying that goes:  "Listen to the patient, not the doctor."

In The House of God we are given some laws.  Law IV is:

THE PATIENT IS THE ONE WITH THE DISEASE.

Since this is a commandment, we should listen to our patients.

When Sarah Ezekiel received a diagnosis of motor neurone disease, she became deeply depressed. Seventeen years later, she describes what helped her regain hope.  Her essay for the BMJ is profound and helpful.

 Link to BMJ essay.

A Bedside Conversation with Wilder Penfield

Alan Blum is a professor of Family Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine at Tuscaloosa  He and I have met in cyberspace through our mutual friend, Dr. Dileep Bal of Kapaa, Hawaii.  I was researching the great neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, when I came across an article by Alan Blum in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2011. "A Bedside Conversation with Wilder Penfield."

Blum writes, "Recently, I came across six prescription-size pages of handwritten notes from an hour-long conversation I had with the [Montreal] Institute’s founder, Dr. Wilder Penfield on the morning of Apr. 3, 1976, when he was a patient in the Ross Pavillion at the Royal Vic. Having hoped to meet him since the start of my training, I stopped off at my room after completing night-call and sign-out to muster the courage to introduce myself and to pick up my copy of The Torch, his novel about Hippocrates’ battle to lay the foundations of medicine."

 Among other things, Alan Blum is a talented illustrator.  We have featured his drawings on Cell 2 Soul in 2010.  His recollection of meeting Penfield shortly before the latter's death is moving and worth reading.