Nearing the end of his life, a patient tells me, “If you should ever need it, I hope your doctor is as good to you as you have been to me.”

It is an unusual benediction.

Honouring our long association, I have dropped in after hours when crisis befell and had difficult conversations with his wife, not to mention with other doctors, to say that sometimes “best interest” means allowing someone to die. Now I sit at the foot of his bed one last time, but I can’t imagine any doctor thinking these are “favours” rendered to our patients; they are, simply, the bread and butter of good medicine.

He drifts off to sleep before I can tell him that I have already experienced my share of life-altering generosity from a doctor.

The beginning of my motherhood was marked by the sudden loss of a previously healthy, midterm twin pregnancy. Destiny knew how to deal a swift blow; I was pregnant on Monday and not pregnant on Wednesday. The following week on ward rounds, my gravid abdomen continued to attract my elderly patients who desperately missed their grandchildren. When was I due? Was this my first? Boy or girl?

I did not have the heart to puncture their joy, instead saving my anguish for the bathroom, willing my body to shrink back to size. In an act of defiance, I tossed out my vitamins, cursing those translucent pills for the telltale “glow”.

Despite it raining kindness, I felt stranded in my grief. Betrayed by God and body, I was too young to know the universality of........

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