Redemption
Joseph Weiner (Stony Brook Southampton)
She slept well in the
hospital reclining chair. She slept well
everywhere: in the car, at the movies, and once
in the middle of sex. In retrospect, she had narcolepsy and
sometimes she dissociated, and I wish I had understood more about her
PTSD in real-time, as if that would have made a difference because the clock started
backward decades earlier when she puffed a pack a day. But who knows because I begged her to stop the weekly cigarettes she had tapered to, nevertheless,
she continued for as long as we knew each other—eighteen years—and
even after I’d learned ways to motivate patients to stop smoking,
I never tried those ways with her because she was my wife,
and she didn’t want to be my patient (except in the
early years when she pressured me to prescribe
Prozac because she wouldn’t see a non-
husband psychiatrist, since a non-
husband psychiatrist had
sexually abused her.)
I only wanted
her to be my
wife.
But if I understood more in real-time, I could have
been more compassionate and tolerant because
we all just want to be understood. Don’t
we? And while we don’t want to
be a patient, we do want
others to be patient
and I am a doctor,
wired to heal,
and I did try.
Still, I wish I
could have
done more
to save her
from the
cancer
of her
self.
Joseph Weiner is an MFA student at Stony Brook Southampton and a psychiatrist and medical educator at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. His essays, poetry, and short fiction have been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Bull, and elsewhere.
