"John! What are you doing?" A chorus of voices erupt from the stairway. I can't hear them properly, my mind is already blanking out.
I am not at Baker Street, nor Scotland Yard. I am here in an abandoned office that belonged once to a flourishing scrap yard along the river Thames. I don't really remember the journey here, but I know I made it somehow. My mind is not focussing anymore, and I appear to be staring to my right side, though my body is splayed on my back on the cold floor. No longer able to distinguish voices or see the blurring, fading picture on my mind, I try to cast it back. I know all too well why I am here, and what now is happening to me. I ought to know I am a doctor after all. I feel strange, well for a doctor that's a pretty bad description for a patient to give, but then as a doctor you are sort of a detective. Somebody has a problem and can only describe certain symptoms to you. Some symptoms are obvious from appearances " I observe everything,", others not "From my observations I deduce" . Sometimes you have to compare the facts and eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains is the diagnosis.
Am I boring? "Oh dull!" Am I stupid? "Oh don't' worry everyone is," I certainly don't think so, but then lying here in my situation I am no longer sure what to believe. Before the war I used to have a strong moral sense of what is right and wrong. That's evaporated now. The lines have blurred. Black and White have become grey, and it started with the war. "Will caring about them, help save them?" Afghanistan tore me apart…literally. "No." Pain like that is never forgotten, yet I am not in pain now. Perhaps that's what happens when the enzymes in your body start to shut down.
Then I returned from Afghanistan to London. Bustling, vibrant and yet so ignorant. I have watched people passing, judged their emotions and wondered, if only for the briefest moment, do they know the bittersweet truth of life? "What is it like in your stupid little minds? Is it nice not being me?" Then my mind is interrupted by the thrill of the chase. "The game… is on!" Life is full of facts, codes and emotions. Some more vibrant to each of us, strange how when you can no longer see or hear those colours of life become so apparent. "It's a three patch problem," You remember those you've loved and lost, and then the guilt strikes. It's even worse when someone pushes it into your mind further. That's why I am here. That's why I am relaying this to myself and to you whoever is listening.
I have always thought of myself as a doctor. I trained at St Bart's in London, when very young, I remember my training thinking I was so clever. The brightest student with a glittering career ahead of me. Then it all changed. My life changed, my friends changed, my retrospective view changed. I chose to throw myself into detective work of a different kind. I no longer felt the clever and prospective hopes I had once felt. All thanks to one man. "Good Samaritan…bad Samaritan!"
It hurts now.
One single man seemingly emotionless on the outside, not quite so on the inside. "Doesn't mean I can't appreciate." I understand what drew me to him. I needed a distraction and a flat share. I got both, yet I wondered if I should not have. His mind is brilliant of course, speeding like a hardrive. Yet for all of this he is so much like everyone else so completely and utterly ignorant. "Oh I see.. You meant stupidly ignorant in a nice way." He doesn't see the bigger picture. He makes a diagnosis and forgets the prognosis. I often wondered if I completed the half that's missing. But that's not true. He has shown his capability of emotion, "Alright? Are you alright?" But that is not enough, and it is to his sharp tongue that I have eventually surrendered too.
My central nervous system has sensed the problem. It hasn't taken long, merely a couple of minutes, but then everything is immediate when it comes to the nerves of the body. I sense something else a sharp stabbing pain above my heart, then it starts to beat louder and louder. My blood is flowing faster down my arteries and veins, yet my inspiration rate does not increase. The darkness is tilting and so inviting "Could be dangerous!" My mind is made up. It is over. I have nothing more to observe, deduce and eliminate. I sense my conclusion the greatest and most practical for a doctor to think.For all I am, and ever would be. The Science of Deduction!