Dr Lesley Morrison
On the bookmark inside Tools of the Trade, a little pocket book of poems for new doctors, is a poem by the doctor poet Gael Turnbull, ‘Lines for a Bookmark’:
You who read..
May you seek
As you look;
May you keep
What you need;
May you care
What you choose;
And know here
In this book
Something strange,
Something sure,
That will change
You and be yours.
Gael Turnbull, from There Are Words: Collected poems (Shearsman Press, 2006), by permission of the author’s Estate.
This was and is very much our aspiration for this project, to enhance the experience of being a new doctor, and to provide a comforting, supporting and illuminating friend.
Just on two years ago I got the phone call I didn’t want, that my dear friend Alison was close to passing away. Would I like to join her family sitting in vigil as she slept? Of course. That was hard to do, though, to walk into her bedroom and see her parents, her husband, her three children, a couple of other friends and a minister seated around her bed, all quietly focused on her. She lay curled up like a child, breathing deeply, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I didn’t know quite what to do. Conversation seemed inane.