The Fit and The Wine

My patient was little more than a month or two from dying—at best. A malignant brain tumor would be the cause of her death. Many times this cancer had gripped her in wave after wave of epileptic seizures. These onslaughts began crashing upon her with increasing frequency and intensity until she became overwhelmed with anxiety, dreading where and when the next attack might occur. Her team of doctors prescribed an ever-expanding and increasingly ineffective list of medications and anti-convulsants aimed at holding the fits at bay. Her physicians—myself included– admonished her to avoid alcohol at all costs, lest it perturb her liver functions and, in turn, diminish the concentrations of medications circulating in her blood stream.

In what was to prove her penultimate visit with me, she described a trip that she and her husband had taken to the top of the nearby Santa Catalina mountain range. They had chosen Mt. Lemmon, overlooking the city of Tucson, as their destination as it was accessible by a well-paved road that could carry them all the way to the summit. By this time, her tumor had robbed her of almost all ability to ambulate and she was no longer able to navigate any treacherous terrain, let alone a mountain trail.

Upon arriving at the clearing on the summit, her husband had opened the trunk of his car and, from within its depths, produced a picnic basket, complete with traditional red-and-white checkered tablecloth that he laid out on the ground with painstaking care. The wicker basket, he confessed to his wife, was full of nothing but sin. It contained paté de foie gras. A rich, runny Camembert cheese. And fresh baguette bread and pastries aplenty. He also produced a bottle of vintage red wine.

There, on top of the mountain, he admitted: “I have always been holding onto this bottle. I’ve had it for several years, hoping some great occasion would come along and then I could open it. A chance to celebrate something, to commemorate…something. But a couple of days ago, I came to my senses and decided there is only one thing worth celebrating: today.”

“So what, exactly, are we celebrating?” she asked. “There’s not much to celebrate. I’m dying.”

“No. That’s not exactly true,” he replied. “We’re going to celebrate that you’re alive. You’ll only be dying in that last minute when you actually expire. But, for the rest of the time–up until then–you’re alive. That’s what I want—what we can choose–to celebrate.” His wife looked at him for a second.

“You know, that the doctor told us that I shouldn’t drink. Alcohol could trigger another…event.” The husband didn’t seem to even be listening.

He popped the cork out. “Don’t bother,” she said, “I’m not going to have a drink.”

“Watch this,” the husband said. He slowly decanted the wine into an elegantly stemmed glass of cut crystal. He poured the wine until the glass three quarters full.

“If you drink too much of that,” his wife admonished him, “you won’t be able to drive us back down the mountain. And you know I can’t drive because of my seizures.”

He held the wine glass high up in front of him against the sun where it stood like a gigantic, luminescent ruby. As the light danced through it, he turned the glass by its stem round and round between his fingertips. With each revolution, blood-red shafts of light shimmered.

“Oh, my,” she exclaimed, “it looks like it’s practically alive.”

“It is. The sun is dancing with the grapes right now. There is nothing in this glass that can hurt you.” He held the glass in her direction.

“Think so?”

“I know so. I promise. Nothing this beautiful can hurt.” With that, she took the glass, full of light and wine and love, and held it to her lips. She took a sip and then a full swallow.
“That is a great glass of wine, isn’t it?”

“The best,” he smiled.

The wife finished her first glass. She looked at her husband inquisitively. “You think I dare have another glass?”

“Well, what’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.

She smiled, grabbed the bottle herself and poured another glass, fuller than the first. She then held the glass up high for a toast. “I suppose the worst is that I get a good buzz on and could just go on and die happy. Right now. Then you’d have to drive my corpse back down the mountain.”

“Well, I’d have to drive you down either. Dead or alive. It’s the same amount of gas.”

My patient never did have a seizure. Not on that day, or any of the remaining forty-three she had left to live on this earth. All of us, the doctors, were wrong. The wine was right. As a physician, I can’t help but wonder how many patients we restrain with our conservative advice, how many moments of joy we have inadvertently extinguished with sage, restrained medical advice. It is a part of our frail intellectual tradition of medicine that we play it safe and teach our patients to avoid unnecessary risks. But so often the moments of greatest happiness and abandon lie in the direction of the greatest chance.

previously published by Dr. Hamilton on Boomer-Living.com