Daughter and doctor: two conflicting roles

The most difficult aspect for me about my father's illness—Lewy body disease—is accessing my feelings about what is happening. Because of my training as a physician, I find it hard to engage emotionally with my grief. I have written poetry and, through this, discovered all kinds of previously unacknowledged emotions, chiefly anger. But my professionalism has me struggling with the daily events that my siblings and mother seem able to process on a more fundamental level. I am slowly losing my father, and yet, I struggle to find any tears.

I find myself in constant conflict about my roles as daughter and physician. As I write, we are waiting for a bed for him in a specialist hospital, and there is nothing I can do to make one materialize faster. I try to rationalize the situation to the family: this is how the service works, and his own physicians have it under control. My mother asks me to intervene, to speed things up; I am, after all, a doctor. I continue to ask to be allowed to be his daughter.

Until recently, my father attended a day center. He stopped going when, after falling several times a day, we finally saw how immobile he had become. He was slowly becoming dehydrated, and no one had noticed. I feel guilty about not having noticed this myself. It's the same sort of guilt I felt 2 years ago when I finally realized—albeit belatedly—that something was wrong with my father.

I went to see the family physician who my parents had been registered with for more than 20 years and asked him to refer my father to a neurologist. I gave him allowances for finding it difficult to deal with another physician but expected, out of professional courtesy, if nothing else, that he would grant the request. He did nothing. Eventually, after another 6 months had elapsed, my mother pleaded with their physician. My father finally got to see a neurologist and got his diagnosis. The same family physician refused to prescribe the medication that was suggested by the neurologist. With a heavy heart at the blurring of my roles, I agreed to provide the prescriptions myself. I finally persuaded my parents to find a physician who would look after them properly.

My anger at the family physician's arrogance and ineptitude has not abated, and I still compose letters to him in my head of disgust. Doubtless he would respond that I am simply upset that my father is incurably ill and that, as his daughter, I am simply expressing displaced anger. To a degree, he may be right. But I am also a physician, and as I watch my father slowly disappear and die, I know that what I am also upset about is that I share the same profession with physicians who do not care about their patients. And the doctor in me simply feels shame.