Doctors are always in a hurry, but Dr Lodge had time to care
AUTHOR Hunter Davies’s health hero is Dr Philip Lodge, a palliative medicine consultant, who helped care for his wife, the novelist Margaret Forster, before her death last year.
MARGARET was in the Marie Curie hospice in Hampstead last year, which has a lovely leafy garden and is beautifully appointed. In fact, her bedroom was bigger and nicer than the one we have at home — and it was free.
One day I noticed there were four empty beds. How could this be? So I asked Dr Lodge.
‘I’d have thought,’ I said to him, ‘people would be dying to come into this hospice . . .’
Dr Lodge smiled, a trifle wearily. I think he had heard this pathetic bad-taste joke many times over the years.
I first met Philip — for we were quickly on first name terms — when Margaret was still at home in bed. He arrived from the Royal Free Hospital to administer some morphine, in person. Consultants are normally awfully grand beasts who stride around their wards with an entourage of registrars and housemen, students and flunkeys. They have a special walk: chest out, head high, staring no one in the face. But Philip is quiet and low-key, doesn’t look or act at all like the archetypal consultant and has a local London accent, not posh.
The day he first visited, Margaret was really tired and fed up with having to answer the same old questions she’d been asked for 40 years, ever since she had a double mastectomy.
In hospital, it seems that everyone coming on duty, from the cleaners upwards, has a clipboard on which they must write down your name, age, treatments, religion, favourite vegetable . . .
‘Sorry Margaret,’ said Philip, getting out his clipboard but sensing her irritation. ‘I have to ask you some more things. It’s my bread and butter.’
She smiled at his dry reply, the first time she had smiled in days. And I also noticed on that first visit how Philip, as he sat at her bedside, glanced round the room, taking in our Lake District paintings, Clarice Cliff pottery and family photos.
Doctors don’t usually do that: you are a number to them, not a human being. And they are always in hurry.
Philip always appeared to have as much time as was needed. He told us how much he loved his job: making people in pain as comfortable as possible, going home knowing he had made a difference.
I was given his direct number to ring if she collapsed. And when she did, I rang him at the Marie Curie hospice where he works half the week. He said he would have a bed ready for her and arrange an ambulance.
Margaret died early last year, on February 8, in the hospice. They were wonderful with her and I do feel enormously grateful to them all — and Dr Lodge in particular.