My respirologist, Dr Bob Hyland, is recuperating from surgery.
” They work with herbs and penicillin.
They work with gentleness and the scalpel.
They dig out the cancer,
close an incision
and say a prayer
to the poverty of the skin.
They are not Gods
though they would like to be;
they are only human
trying to fix up a human. ..”
from “Doctors” by Anne Sexton
I’ve been a patient of Dr. Robert Hyland for nearly half my life, first in cramped offices at the old Wellesley Hospital and more recently in the Respirology Clinic at St. Michael’s. My chart is the width of his fist, and my gratitude for his care is the depth of my deepest breath.
Early in December 2011, Dr. Bob underwent surgery, and will be in recovery for several months. I know this because he told me about his pending journey under the knife when I last saw him in October. This was just before we chatted about watching cheetahs on his Tanzanian safari, and not long after he gave me hell for messing around with my medicine dosages. That’s the kind of man and doctor that he is – empathetic, aware and open.
For many years he served as Physician-in-Chief at St. Mike’s and for many more on the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. His peers laud him as a superb clinician, outstanding teacher and fine scientist. His patients would agree, especially the ones in the Philippines who benefit from the clinic that he helped to establish and where he has worked during his holidays for many years.
But now this excellent doctor and even better man is a patient, just like me and the others who rely on the skills, diligence and compassion of the health care system. I worry, as a patient and as a friend, how he will fare after his surgery as he experiences the fragility of his corpus, the frustration of healing and, as Anne Sexton puts it so beautifully, “the poverty of the skin”.
I, and all of his patients both in Canada and abroad, wish him “the wealth of health”.
