Looks deceive.

It should come as no real surprise that young folk question who they really are - I know that I have questioned myself over the decades and in my line of business I constantly come across patients who ‘stress’ over various issues in their lives - their skin, their looks, their moods -  and their seeming inability to to cope or manage them: “if only I were different”.

I suspect that all of us have looked into the mirror from time to time and would dearly love to change something about their appearance - taller, shorter, less wrinkles, more hair… And now we have the social media frenzy of youth ‘transitioning’: I’m currently awaiting the next wave of ‘transitoners’ - people over the age of 55/60 who would dearly like to have the bodies of a Greek god, skin that stops sagging and a memory that improves as we age.

But…

What you look like doesn’t define who you really are. That beauty lies within your heart, your mind, your soul and is beyond the reach of a scalpel or a hormone or a change of clothes.

I’d like to tell you about a person who I will call Pru - it’s not her real name because her family are probably still alive, albeit that it is some 30 years since this incident happened.

I was at my medical practice when a new patient came in: Pru was in her mid-thirties and looked, at first glance, to be in great health. With a big grin on her face she sat down and put a tape-recorder (they were a part of pre-history for most of you, and were the forerunner of voice memos that you now have on your iphone/android) and asked if she could record our consultation. This was an unusual request to say the least but in principal I had nothing against the idea and told her that I was fine with that.

Pru smiled, clicked the start button and announced that she had a list of five GPs who she was interviewing for the job of helping her with her health. “Am I the first one” I asked in genuine innocence, “No, you’re the last and two of them refused to allow the recording.” My ego retreated somewhat and the interview commenced. I don’t remember any of the questions that she asked me because from the start she announced that she had advanced ovarian cancer and that there were no current medical treatments that would help her. She also told me that she had two young children and that she wanted some more time with them to help them towards the teenage years before she died.

Sometimes in medicine it’s difficult not to be shocked at the things our patients share with you. At all times I follow the maxim:

To cure sometimes, to relieve often and to care always.

I think that Pru sensed that because it was my real honour and privilege to share the journey with her as, with great good will, courage and her infectious smile, she inexorably moved towards her death.

During that journey, the healthy, joyous person who had marched in and challenged me to care beyond my understanding of the word, changed. Not internally, not in her heart and soul, not in her attitude to embracing life as it slipped through her fingers and not in her desire to pass on all she could to those two daughters of her. But she did change on the outside as the cancer spread throughout her body, and secondary tumours produced lumps on her skin which distorted her shrinking features - but never her smile.

Everyone whose life she touched was illuminated by  her presence, even in her final days and afterwards at her sad yet joyful funeral where tears of enormous sadness were tempered by the real feeling that a great spirit had been liberated from a tortured body.

Pru’s final months were not in vain: I know that her legacy lives on. So what does she continue to teach us?

Who you are does NOT depend on what you look like: it comes from your heart, your mind and your soul. And no surgeons knife or hormonal supplement is going to enhance those.