Title: Physician, heal thyself
Author: WriterKos
Rating: FR13
Parings: none
Characters: Ducky
Genres: Drama, Character Study
Warnings: none
Summary: Ducky considers his choices and his decisions.
Chapter 1: Physician, heal thyself (Ἰατρέ, θεράπευσον σεαυτόν)
Physician, heal thyself. That's an old proverb which is actually quoted by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, chapter four verse twenty three. It goes like this:
And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb,
Physician, heal thyself:
whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum,
do also here in thy country.
Our Lord Jesus was a very wise man, aware of the difficulties a healer might face when confronted with his own mortality. We dedicate years of our lives to soothe and comfort the weak and the wounded, but we lack the ability of reaching out when our body fails us or when our very soul bleeds.
I've realized that I might be having problems a couple of years back, when a constant lingering pain settled in my hips and upper thighs. I immediately dismissed it as an expected result from long hours standing in autopsy, working body after body in a very gruesome case Jethro and his team investigated.
I also started to develop a light case of Uveitis, a light inflamation in the Uvea, which is a inflamation in the middle layer of the eye. I also medicated myself with glucocorticoid steroids, which aleviated the symptoms for the time being.
Mr. Palmer and I worked nonstop for almost three days last month and we had to request the assistance of another M.E. to finish the postmortem examinations due to the time constraint and the urgency of solving the case.
After that specific case, a lingering pain settled on my lower back that no amount of self medication could help. Yet, my responsibilities with mother led me to overlook the signs that slowly crept over me, so I dedicated my time to her failing health not bothering to look within me for the answers of questions that demanded my attention.
I've always been a healthy man, with a controlled diet and no lack of exercise. Turning and cutting bodies can be extenuating exercise sometimes, but autopsy is a gym very few athletes venture to enter.
And whenever they do enter, they are usually guests on my table.
Yet, now that I'm here, being subjected to the bright lights of a MRI scanning the very core of my bones and cells, I ask myself if I shouldn't have been humbler in my ways and sought help earlier, when the pain hadn't yet become troublesome and my hands hadn't yet started shaking.
I'm terribly concerned. As all possible outcomes my mind can come up for the symptoms I'm presenting are bad.
I really should have gone to a doctor earlier.