Messy Stories
Sometimes in a hospital day, a story drops into my lap, polished as a pearl. I might be taking a history or doing an operation. But in the back of my mind, a detail has lodged and is already forming into something shapely with a beginning, middle and end. All that’s left to do when I get home is write it down.
Lately though, I’ve been feeling suspicious of neatness. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s the rigidity of the story paradigm - Campbell’s journey, Freytag’s triangle, the three-act structure, call it what you will – that’s started to bother me, the sense of yet another algorithm demanding we fit in. Or maybe it’s simpler, an instinct as I get older that truth doesn’t need to be dressed up in fancy clothes. Or as the wonderful Aussie writer Helen Garner, whose diaries I’m loving, says: “Meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed”.
I certainly wasn’t looking for anything deep at the end of my list on Friday. By the time the nurse brought in my last patient, I was already fantasising about a dip at the lido: the blue shock of immersion, the shush of wind through the trees, leaves scattering on the water.
“He comes everywhere with me” the woman said when I looked up, leading her husband by the hand.
I wondered if she’d seen some irritation on my face at having our small, windowless room filled with surplus bodies which, at that stage in the day, meant any more than the one I needed to stick my knife into. I felt a familiar pulse of shame and resolved to show this married couple the leisure they deserved. I scrubbed carefully at the sink, hooked a stool over to the table with my foot and settled to the surgical field: a large skin cancer in a light-bright circle of forearm. The couple were teasing each other and she was laughing right next to me, her big teeth with serrated edges like children have when their adult ones first come in. The three of us were positioned like parents round a child’s bed. Or am I only thinking that now?
We bantered about marriage, theirs 60 years long, mine 25. I asked what their tip was for enduring the marital prison and they laughed. I thought of the pleasure of being a middle-aged doctor, the ease with which one knows what to joke about. I so often got this wrong when I was younger, trying too hard to establish a rapport, then overstepping.
They said the trick was surviving, and that they wouldn’t have managed had they not stuck together. I was cutting into her arm, white light against the red of her insides and the yellow of my gloves and the green of the drape, my favourite view. She smiled about how hectic it had been having a family, and then she said suddenly that their eldest son had died from a brain haemorrhage aged 28. He’d gone to buy painkillers for a headache, collapsed in the shop, and had been rushed to hospital where he spent a week on life support. When they turned him off, the husband said, we sat with him for 4 hours until he died. This father gasped and let out a deep, dry sob. His wife reached her free hand out and they touched and looked at each other and I looked up too.
There was no awkwardness as we sat in silence there, me with my knife and gauze. And as I tidied her wound and dressed it and they told me about the famous neurosurgery hospital their son died in, I thought about my own son, rushed across town six years ago to the next-door children’s hospital with a massive brain haemorrhage, when he was just a teenager. The blankness of those waiting days. The surgery that changed his story from one of disaster to recovery.
It wouldn’t have felt right to interrupt their sad memory with my own redemptive one and so I didn’t. But when, shortly after, I walked out into the clarity of a perfect spring day, it struck me that this couple, ostensibly receiving my care, had given me something precious. Not just a reminder of the fact I will never tire of, that my son is here. But a realisation that a story can only be neat when it’s finished. A messy narrative is one with breath in it, one which continues to write itself with each new moment. He is alive. He is alive now. He is still alive…
This made me cry. Have you considered publishing your work somewhere? You deserve acclaim.
But really, thank you for writing this.
Profoundly moving. There is a rare kind of bravery in admitting to that 'familiar pulse of shame' when exhaustion makes us resent the extra bodies in a room, only to be completely broken open by the depth of what those bodies carry.
Your reflection on Helen Garner’s quote is so beautifully realized here. By resisting the urge to offer your own redemptive story—by not tying theirs up in a neat bow of shared trauma—you allowed their grief to just be. It’s a masterclass in clinical humility.
That final realization—that a messy narrative is the only one with breath still in it—sent chills down my spine. The heartbeat of this piece isn't in a polished, three-act structure; it’s in that urgent, beautifully repetitive mantra of gratitude at the end: He is alive now. Thank you for leaving the story unfinished, and for letting us feel the weight of that breath.