“Do you come from a medical background?”
Usually at the end of the call, after the doctor has read what I have sent. I say no. The call moves on. The question lives in my head for the rest of the day.
A cardiologist writes “a murmur was detected” and moves to the next line. He is right to. After all these years, to him a murmur is a sound he has heard in hundreds of little chests. Most of the murmurs turn out to be fine.
Just outside the hospital, sitting in the car park, the mother reads the same line on her phone. She hears murmur and she hears her son’s heart.
I did not know what a murmur was the first time I wrote about one. So, I asked. The answer then became the first line of the page.
“A heart murmur isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a sound.”
The cardiologist would not think to write that. It is too obvious to him to be worth a sentence. And the mother was never going to ask him. She was going to ask the page, at night, after he had gone home.
The medicine remains his. Every clinical line needs to go back to him before anything goes on the page.
But the mother is not on the call. So I ask.