A Match to the Heart by Gretel Ehrlich Page B

was too much of it, as now for Sam: too many new sights and smells to be taken in. We retreated to the known world of the dog dish and deck chair, like refugees huddled between two strange countries:
    the country-of-the-sea-without-cattle and the country-of-too-many-people, and under cloudy skies slept hard and dreamless as the dead.
    The next afternoon, at the time of day when lambs and calves gambol and dogs play before the lid of night snaps down, Sam let loose on the beach. His short tail tucked under, back feet wheeling up almost to his ears, he ran in great loops and wide figure-eights. Finally, far down the coast, he veered off to chase a sanderling, then, turning and running in my direction, he leapt full tilt into my arms. Home.

chapter 12
    The French call the relationship between doctor and patient “un couple de malade,” meaning paired-up, yoked together by illness, like a marriage. It is so. There is chemistry between the healer and the one being healed, and those who minister to the heart evoke a profound and tender connection. To be “yoked” like a pair of oxen is an image I liked, because it implies the dual effort it takes to get well or else die properly.
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If your heart stops, you have four minutes to get help or resume spontaneous rhythm before the brain stops functioning properly. Who is going to get the gift of the next heartbeat, wonders anyone whose heart has stopped. As Blaine’s patient, I was hooked to him and he to me by that exhilarating urgency.
    We argued about whether or not he saved my life. I said he did. He said I just needed someone who took the time to see what was going wrong. But the healing has been chemistry. He sat on my hospital bed when he talked, shooting a million questions at me, not from the pathological premise of illness, but from the sane ground of surviving well. He asked about work and love, as well as about dizziness and chest pain; he charted a course for how I could live given my disabilities, and the course was vaster than what I could have achieved just then—it was something to aspire to. “Do anything you want,” he said, “as long as there’s no chest pain. You can always lie down if you start to pass out. That might be a little awkward sometimes, but who cares?” Death did-n’t daunt him, nor did the inconvenience of injury.
    Two thousand years ago Hippocrates said: “A patient who is mortally sick might yet recover out of belief in the goodness of the physician.” About the patient-healer relationship Blaine said: “If you care about your patient, that caring will dictate your behavior; you’ll listen, ask questions, listen again, and ask again. The patient will tell you what you need to know.”
    The thickness or thinness of a doctor’s armor determines the distance he can see into a patient, the intimate ability to touch the vital force surging somewhere through the body, undetectable by MRI, CAT scan, or angiogram. Blaine put his stethoscope down on my heart and listened to forty-six years of thumping—joyful detonations and solitary longings—just like everyone’s. When he lifted his head and opened his eyes I thought he must already know a great deal about me—the flawed toughness, nicked by fears and loneliness, and the excesses of passion—and that he could see if Death was still in the corner of the room, or at the end of my bed, but he said nothing.
    Above and beyond the drama of cardiac arrest, or the threat of it, is the metaphorical territory of the heart: if love desists, if passion arrests, if compassion stops circulating through the arteries of society, then civilization, such as it is, will stop. When I looked up at Blaine from my hospital bed after my heart rate and pulse had dropped out of existence, he appeared to be some kind of all-American bodhisattva, someone who travels the middle way that is the human realm of the heart, not because he