At about 11pm every night, just as the other patients are falling into a deep sleep, Susan would get out of bed and start making a racket.
She would walk up and down the halls in the ward, talk to people, disrupt the work of nurses and prevent the ill from a restful recovery sleep. Her hyperactivity would taper off at about 4am and the nurses would find Susan the next morning not in her bed but in some corner of the ward, either on the floor or on the benches fast asleep.
All the nurses wanted to get rid of her. At the weekly meetings they all rallied for her to be transfered to another mental facility. But Letitia would not allow it.
“What does our mission statement say? How can we promise care and service if we’re going to just transfer her off? What’s so caring about that?”
The newer nurses were easily flustered by difficult patients but Letitia was a veteran toughened by many years of testing patients.
“I’ll go have a chat with her.”
“Does she have time to chat with her?” whispered the nurses between themselves, wondering whether their busy supervisor could actually spare a free moment for this patient.
Letitia - from the eyes of my brother's Lomo LCA
A few weeks before, the ward had a patient that was suffering from terrible headaches. When they struck, the patient would scream about and call for her pain-killers which the nurses were reluctant to keep prescribing because of risky medical side-effects.
But once the patient began requesting, they did not know how to shut her up.
Just like before, a complaint went up to Letitia.
“Why do you think she’s having this headache?” Letitia asks me. “Why do you think so many people have all sorts of cancers today?”
I can only shrug. I’m guessing it has something to do with our diet of processed food and a lifestyle of stress, but her answer comes out of nowhere.
“Her family last visited her 2 days ago and they probably won’t come back for another month or more.”
My God, was this lady just suffering from a lack of love?!
“I sat with her, offered her a cup of tea, held her hand and asked her to tell me about the pain.”
One thing led to another and soon her whole life story came pouring out.
At the end of 20 minutes Letitia asked her if she was now ready for her painkiller.
“That’s okay Letitia. The pain has gone away now.”
That is all it took!! The remedy is love!!
The more I think about it, the more I feel that this is true not just in hospital or mental wards. How can we expect our children to be less rebellious or do better at school if we do not show them adequate love? How can we expect our co-workers or employees to be less snappy and more efficient if we do not show them love?
You know, I can’t help thinking – perhaps certain cancers are NOT passed down genetically. Perhaps it is a bad mental model, an entrenched habit, a defective lifestyle or negative family dynamic that is being passed down causing this cancer to pop up through the generations?
Letitia leans forward, her face tenses up and her voice takes on an earnest, desperate tone, “we live in such a lonely world, Manesh.”
Alamak! She’s right. We need to raise up more lovers. True lovers. Or soon we’re going to be filling up hospitals faster than we can produce doctors.
A quotation from ‘Abdu’l-Baha confirms Letitia’s theory of medicine ~ There is nothing greater or more blessed than the Love of God! It gives healing to the sick, balm to the wounded, joy and consolation to the whole world, and through it alone can man attain Life Everlasting. The essence of all religions is the Love of God, and it is the foundation of all the sacred teachings.
Maybe we can do our fair share in our office spaces and take a bit of time to love our neighbours with a ray of the love of God.
Perhaps we could ask them the most important question we could ever ask another human being – how are you?
Really, how are you?
A patient is comforted by a fellow patient after a fight with another patient at a psychiatric hospital. The World Health Organization warned that the financial global crisis will probably worsen the situation of mental health care in poor countries, as the majority of people who suffer from a mental disorder in developing countries do not receive treatment and many are stigmatized and are subject to rejection and abuse. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)
