Thread by @TheRealDoctorT

“I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind,
In balance with this life, this death.”

- Excerpt from “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by William Butler Yeats, 1918.

I must find balance.

They tell me. 1/

They warn me that I’ll burn out.

That I need to find an outlet.

I tell them I write. They say writing isn’t enough.

I dusted off my guitar, tuned it up, and started playing again. But I’ve lost the calluses on my fingertips.

Steel strings are cutting.

Music is pain. 2/

What does it mean to be out of balance? How do you know where your center is?

Is it the fatigue? I’ve been tired for as long as I can remember being in medicine.

Not sleepy.

But tired. Inside.

Folded up. Origami.

I sigh, drink some coffee, and load the next chart. 3/

My clinic days have a rhythm to them. A momentum.

See the patient in the exam room, go back to my office, breathe, and repeat.

I enjoy my work, truly.

But this fatigue lingers.

I think we all carry weights within us.

Balance, perhaps, is finding which ones to let go. 4/

I knock on the door to the exam room.

I always knock. Old habit. I’ve never stopped to wonder what I’d do if a patient said “don’t come in!”

Probably not go in, I guess.

“Come in!” His voice is filled with mirth, just like the rest of him.

I can’t help but smile. 5/

There are people who are happy, and then there are people who are joyful.

Joyful people can be happy or sad or upset- but their joy will elevate them, and elevate those it touches.

He is joyful.

I ask him how he’s doing, but he wants to know how I’m doing first. 6/

I tell him I’ve been a little tired. It’s been busy. The hospitals are packed, and my clinic is booking further and further out.

He nods understandingly.

I ask him how he’s doing.

Wonderfully, he says, and he smiles.

He wears a t-shirt, blue jeans, white sneakers. 7/

As we talk about his kidney function and other medical issues, he frequently makes humorous or kind-hearted observations and I can’t help but laugh.

Somehow, we end up talking about the coronavirus.

“You know,” he tells me, “I’ve been to China.”

“Really?”

“Yeah!” 8/

He tells me about Shanghai. How it was when he visited it many years ago.

How the Huangpu River flows right through the city, dividing it into an older Western district and a more modern Eastern district.

How the technology was incredible, and awe-inspiring, even then. 9/

He is a superb story-teller.

I am enthralled as he tells me about a building re-purposed by the Japanese in WWII, or one of the world’s tallest towers being used for media broadcasts across China.

“What were you doing in China?” I finally ask.

“Selling measuring scales.” 10/

“Selling scales?”

“Well, yes. You see, in the rest of the world, every kitchen has a measuring scale. They weigh things, all the time. Not like our teaspoons. And also industrial scales. I sold them worldwide.”

His chart just says “retired, sales.”

I never knew. 11/

I reluctantly steer the conversation back to medicine, and go through the remaining rituals of the office visit.

As we are wrapping up, he says something in the course of our goodbyes.

“Everything that is made, is weighed.”

It’s apparently a motto, in the scales business. 12/

Something about that motto is resonating with me. I sense that there’s a meaning within it that just might help me.

Before he leaves, I have one last favor to ask of him. I ask if I can share his story with others someday.

He laughs, his big booming laugh.

“Sure thing.” 13/

And so here I am, awake long past the time I should have gone to sleep, on a random Sunday night.

It’s raining outside, the steady patter of raindrops against the glass windows is keeping me company.

I think about all the things we make, and the ways in which we weigh them. 14/

“The hatchet must fall on the block; the oak must be cleft to the centre. The weight of the world is on my shoulders. Here is the pen and the paper-”

- From “The Waves” by Virginia Woolf, 1931.

Everything that is made, is weighed.

And I try to balance my scales once again.