I’m starting to see significant change in one patient I’ve been working with for just under a year, this last remedy finally hitting something really deep and substantial. I was beginning to wonder if she was finding anything of value out of the treatment, and she tells me she’s been getting well and not even realizing it until she considers the absence of pain. She tells me, after I question her about the specifics, that she’s experienced none of the pains she complained of, after taking the last dose.
So that’s a reassuring thing.
Ironically, the remedy’s Aurum.
When I was learning all about the basics, Dr. John warned me that the patients I would receive would all push my buttons in some way. The patients who will seek me out will do so because they feel some kind of affinity for me, some kind of alignment. There is no way to know what that could be, and you have to be on guard never to confuse a dynamic which builds out of this potential friction or camaraderie with what you actually need to consider in order to understand the patient and the case properly. The patients you see will all teach you something you must know for your own survival, whether that interaction is good or bad. Dr. John told me all his early patients were suffering from severe psychosis (they were all schizophrenic); all my patients are potential cancer victims, and many have even sought me out because of the disease or because they want the means to ensure they will survive the disease. These are the patients who fall into the “fired” category, as well. The ones who desperately needed arsenicum, whose physical pathology masked disease that was so much deeper and so much more destructive on a mental level. Often when the physical pain cleared their mental symptoms worsened, a bad sign but one that can be misinterpreted in these cases. Most patients are thrilled when their presenting complaint has been removed: these ones will want you dead for making them face themselves (whether that means their own fears, their own misgivings, their own self-hatred).
I can definitely see myself in them, their own raw fear and self-loathing. Their lack of faith about the world, their lack of trust of all things. When I am very vulnerable, very ill, I can feel this way easily, and it can do me in. Now I tell myself that even if I can understand that the reaction is not personal, I may want to cut my interactions off completely, because I’m not likely to do this patient much good. Other times the interaction must end because the patient is unwilling to bring their own “best selves” to the process. They are afraid of facing that. Afraid of opening. Afraid of trusting themselves to who they really are.
So I can’t help them, and I can never show them how to get well.
These patients are the ones I have to let go.
This patient, the Aurum, has been a surprise to me, in that the good response we’re seeing is something I’d overlooked as an option. I didn’t think of the Aurum because she wasn’t depressed, wasn’t suicidal. Just resentful, and stressed out because of it (but the work, the nobility, the responsibility of it all did not stop). There is a mirror image of me in her, somewhere…and I neglected to see it. But I’m glad it was finally seen.
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