Isolation and Intimacy

“But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” –Luke 2:19

I’m currently on the consult service at Hopkins, or rather I am the consult service at Hopkins. I spend my days scurrying miles from one end of the place to another, coat pockets stuffed with drops and lenses, indirect ophthalmoscope looped around one arm. In one sense it’s refreshing to get outside the eye building, walk through the rest of the medicine world. In another it’s exhausting and sometimes frustrating.

Ophthalmology is a world most physicians know nothing about, and aren’t bothered to know anything about; we joke the usual reason for consult is “the patient has an eye and something could be wrong with it.” You’d never consider calling a cardiology consult without pulling out a stethoscope and usually ordering an EKG first, but I’ve never been presented with a useful history or attempted exam before being asked to see someone. Everyone has stories about the consult for “blurry vision” for which the treatment was “have patient put on his glasses.”

On the other hand, the eye is a valuable and mysterious thing, which most understandably approach with caution. In some ways pregnancy is like that: significant but enigmatic. Sometimes isolating and misunderstood—I imagine after we make the news public it will be less so, but I think there’s always a deeper part of it that is separating, from normalcy, from husband and peers.

I think about this when I read about Mary treasuring up and pondering. I’ve always liked the intimacy of that verse, the secret weighing and inner lingering about it. I suppose that’s the boon in these first three private months, and the following months of solitary transformation: the pondering into being of a new intimacy, with myself, God, and a new life. In the end that’s what I like best about ophthalmology: its unique understanding of an intricate and mysterious structure, and the intimacy that brings with the patients to whom it brings valuable sight. I’m changed in the knowing and touching of it, people are changed, and if I have to work a little harder to share it, all the better in the end.

Week Twelve