Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (12 page)

Still holding the receiver, I looked at him and he asked immediately, ‘A patient?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going?’

‘Straightaway.’

‘Shall I come with you?’

‘If you like.’

I got into his car beside him and he drove off at speed. We reached the patient’s house, which wasn’t a house at all but a small damp room in a dark basement at the bottom of a block of flats. A thin young man lay on a dirty mattress on the floor. Beside him was a little pool of blood. I sounded his chest, realizing he was desperately ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and that his life depended on a blood transfusion. I looked round and found my companion standing beside me. He said instantly, ‘Do you need anything?’

‘A bottle of blood straightaway from the emergency services.’

He ran towards the door saying, ‘I’ll take the car and bring the blood straight back.’

I sat on a wooden crate beside the patient and injected him to give him some temporary relief, then prepared the blood transfusion equipment. He came rushing back in with the bottle of blood in his hand. I jumped up; he held the patient’s arm and stayed beside me helping until I’d got the needle firmly fixed in the vein.

I looked at him. Sweat was pouring down his face and he was squatting with his head close to the sick man’s head. I whispered in his ear, ‘Move away from him.’

‘Why?’

‘You might catch it.’

‘What about you?’

‘It’s my job. I have to do it regardless of the conditions.’

He looked at me in silence and didn’t move until I’d finished setting up the transfusion equipment.

We sat side by side on the wooden crate watching the drops of blood flowing from the bottle to the tube to the man’s vein with anxious haste as if they were alive and shared our desperation to save his life.

I looked at him and he smiled gently without speaking. I said, ‘I couldn’t have done all that alone.’

‘Yes, you could.’ Then he pointed at the bottle and said, ‘There’s only a little bit left.’

I looked at the sick man’s eyes and they were focusing better. His breathing was slower and more regular. I took the needle out and he parted his lips and said ‘Thanks’ in a dry voice, looking at both of us. Then he stuck his hand weakly under his dirty pillow and stretched out his thin arm to me clutching a pound note in his fist.

I don’t know what happened to me at that point. The world spun round and I felt ready to faint. I was aware only of a hand supporting me and him saying tenderly, ‘Are you tired?’

I looked at him and didn’t know what to say: I wasn’t tired, I just felt deeply embarrassed and ashamed. Perhaps it was the oddness and squalor of the situation that had upset me, but I felt at that moment that it was not honourable, just or logical for a doctor to take a fee from a patient. How had I held out my hand all these years and taken money from my patients? How had I sold health to people in my surgery? How could I have filled my coffers from the blood and sweat of the sick?

I felt his hand supporting me out of the building and guiding me to the car. Then he drove me home. When he’d seen me to bed he asked smiling, ‘Shall I call a doctor?’ and I felt the tears stinging my face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, taking my hand.

‘I didn’t understand anything. I was blind. All I could see was myself. The battles I was fighting hid the truth from me.’

‘What battles?’

‘Battles against everybody, starting with my mother.’

‘Didn’t you achieve anything?’

‘No... ’

No, I hadn’t achieved a thing. Being a doctor wasn’t a case of diagnosing the illness, prescribing the medicine and grabbing the money. Success didn’t mean filling the surgery, getting rich and having my name in lights. Medicine wasn’t a commodity and success was not to be measured in terms of money and fame.

Being a doctor meant giving health to all who needed it, without restrictions or conditions, and success was to give what I had to others.

Thirty years of my life had gone by without my realizing the truth, without my understanding what life was about or realizing my own potential. How could I have done, when I’d only thought about taking? — although I couldn’t have given something which I didn’t have to give.

‘Try to sleep,’ he said looking at me lovingly.

‘I can’t.’

‘He’ll get better once the blood’s had its effect.’

‘He’ll never get better.’

‘You didn’t take the money.’

‘Don’t remind me... ’

As if I could forget! The cramped basement room, the dirty mattress on the tiles, the pool of blood, the haggard face, the hollow eyes and that long skinny arm stretched out towards me clutching the knife that had cleaved my mind and heart in two.

I hid my face against his chest, seeking his protection, clinging to him. I felt as if I’d been stripped of my past life and had gone back to being a child learning to walk. I’d begun to need a hand to support me. For the first time in my life I felt that I needed someone else, something I hadn’t felt even about my mother.

I buried my head in his chest and wept tears of quiet relief.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 86356 076 8 (pb)
eISBN: 978-0-86356-723-0

© Nawal El-Saadawi, 1988 and 2000
This edition published 2000

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