“I love you,” she said as I was leaving the room.
Although I was stunned for a second or two, I wasn’t really surprised. She and I had gotten along famously from the beginning of our 15 minutes together. She didn’t “love me” in the way a patient with borderline personality disorder “loves” her enabling prescriber. She loved me because I was there, I was experienced, I was kind, and I respected her. She was a sweet, smart, middle-aged black lady with diabetes who had let an abscess brew a few days too long before coming in. We chatted and joked, learning about each other as I took care of her problem. She was the charming but stoic type of patient I good-naturedly chide for not coming in sooner, yet secretly enjoy caring for, because those patients always remind me of my own mother.
My mom would giggle and laugh, sometimes be downright mischievous, and never took herself too seriously. She had the expected toughness of a woman who grew up on a farm in Appalachian Virginia and had lost her parents at a young age. She used to tell me the story of how she secretly and gingerly carried around a broken arm for a few weeks because she was too afraid to tell her parents how she got it (she fell while swinging on vines in the woods near the farm, despite the fact that her mother had told her many times not to). In classic Mustard family fashion, she almost made it to the doctor before succumbing to a massive MI. Her doctor’s appointment was set for the next day to discuss a few days of fatigue, nausea, and “indigestion.” So it goes.
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