if only physicians,like my Dad, could heal themselves

It still feels like I am traversing the end of 2008 and the welcome start of the new year. Something I have left behind with longing regret is knowing my Dad as he was before the veil of Alzheimer's fell more tightly upon him.

The Dad I knew was a surgeon for infants and children,one of the first twelve trained in the USA. He was rather a legend in our small state. He usually had an entourage of residents, medical students and foreign physicians following him everywhere. He loved teaching the students in the operating room , on the wards and intensive care units. He could be spotted in his white coat and his characteristic bow tie or his scrubs. Families of his young patients knew him to be available and willing to ease their emotional distress with long explanations and diagrams. The nurses throughout the hospital could always count on him to put in an IV or access a port or assess a problem. In addition,there were those who thought he had a special sense of impending disaster and intuitively was in the right place at the right time when a young patient, not necessarily his own,would go into crisis. He was surely called to serve the sick and dying. He was my mentor and my reason for studying all those long years to become a pediatrician. He caste a big shadow and now he is being cared for by some of his patient's mothers who work as nurses in the hospital where he lives. So perhaps the sense of saying goodbye to the Dad I knew all those years has made me reticent to enter into the reality of 2009. At little bit at time was my father's favorite saying...