“Whatever you think best Mrs Webster.”
Surely she should feel empowered? She was finally being asked to make a decision except there wasn’t exactly a choice. It wasn’t a passing of the batten but a passing of the buck. Let’s pretend you have all the power in the world now because we’re at the end of the line. We have no more answers.
The routines and rituals of sitting in the hospital whilst learnings, decisions and treatments were bestowed upon her would all stop.
All that knowledge had been defeated with a single question.
“What do I do now?”
Oh dear! Another sad and foreboding response to this week’s prompt from Charli Mills at the Carrot Ranch. You might guess I’ve been working at my memoir amongst other things! One caveat to note: Mrs Webster’s cynical misgivings don’t necessarily reflect my own. I suspect Society’s exhalations of medicine create an expectation many medics might see as getting in the way or burdening their role. One person expecting all the answers whilst the other cannot possibly have them.
February 3, 2016 prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story that explores the question, “What good is power?” Is it a story of empowerment, or a story of a dictator? Poke around power and go where the force takes you this week
Lisa Reiter - Sharing the Story 
February 13, 2016 at 6:16 pm
We all know of too many, through whatever illness – go before their ‘time'(?).
Continue courage and long life. Your post reminds me of my MIL though she had to make those choices in her late 80’s and early 90’s (she should rest).
Thanks for stopping by and visiting my post on this prompt of power.
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February 12, 2016 at 5:34 pm
‘It wasn’t a passing of the batten, but a passing of the buck’. Therein lies the power-shift. Your flash empowers me as I look to immerse myself into the memories of another time and another place and of questions asked – what do doctors really know? – when neither patient or doctor know the answer…not completely. Memoir to Flash Fiction to Memoir. That’s power. Great flash Lisa ❤ xx
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February 11, 2016 at 12:37 pm
It’s a desperate situation when no choice is a good choice, so leave the decision to some one else. A bit like Pilate washing his hands of the decision in another situation. Does abdication also absolve?
I’m pleased it doesn’t reflect your own state of mind but it certainly fits a situation many have been in. Sometimes the patient knows best, but sometimes the patient doesn’t. Who knows?
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February 10, 2016 at 2:56 pm
Powerful flash Lisa. It left me with a fearful hole in my gut. Imagining having a kind of power I really didn’t want. I write and edit for a couple of doctors. And over the last couple of years, I have dipped into many memoirs written by doctors. Doctors are seen as having so much power, but they are often powerless, too, in the face of disease and severe injury and death. I suppose most of us have our own stories where we have witnessed that. Great that you are working on your memoir and using these prompts to carry over reflections from your work into the flashes.
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February 10, 2016 at 6:39 pm
Thank you Jeanne
My foray into fiction is an unexpected way of brain-dumping my subconscious ! I often get part way through a piece for it to dawn on me that it’s something playing at the edges of my mind. It’s a bit like the way some dreams happen as your brain tries to tie up the day’s events!
I’ve enjoyed a few medic’s memoirs – often the most humbling of experiences told with exquisite humanity. Looking forward to “When Breath becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi which I have just ordered after hearing his wife on the radio yesterday. The title alone is quite some leveller.. A neuro-surgeon becomes a patient – I imagine it will be as insightful as it might be heartbreaking.
As for the memoir – slow, slow, slow but a plan in the pipeline!
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February 10, 2016 at 6:56 pm
Yes! When Breath Becomes Air. An editor who rejected my client’s proposal referenced that book as an example of a medical memoir with “intrinsic lyricism.” I looked at the first chapter online and intend to read it too. As for a rollicking rather irreverent but very moving account, try Frank Vertosick Jr.’s When the Air Hits Your Brain, about his neurosurgical residency. A little alarming what might be going on when you, the patient, are out of it!
As for brain dumping, I enjoy the prompts for the same reason. I find I am often doing flash memoir rather than flash fiction. But it’s safer sometimes to call it fiction 🙂
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February 10, 2016 at 7:25 pm
Thank you! I’ll add that one to my reading list. 🤓
..And I am scrivening away some characters for an epistolary novel some day! Should be fun! Xx
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February 10, 2016 at 9:10 am
Your flash certainly conveys the heaviness of empowerment when it really is a shift in accountability like a medical game of hot potato and you’re left holding it. Having gone through so many days and nights at the hospital last year, I saw that different nurses took different authorities of power — some simply did it their way; others explained; a few asked. I’d write on the board “no” to a certain drug causing anxiety only to wake up to a nurse administering it to my friend, telling me to go back to sleep. It was certainly a power struggle. And in what do you do when everything you know doesn’t work. I’m glad to see you working out a theme from your memoir in flash! It can be a helpful tool that way.
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February 10, 2016 at 10:05 am
It’s certainly been a thought provoking prompt Charli, powerful in itself.. 🙂
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February 8, 2016 at 9:58 pm
I sit, often, with my MIL at hospital appointments, with well meaning medics who seek to offer alternatives to a woman who wants none, who wants an answer, not necessarily a right answer and who flounder with the way she circles back to put the burden on them. You’ve captured it well, both sides wishing the other to feel empowered, to take charge.
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February 9, 2016 at 3:11 pm
Do you know what.. You’ve really made me think about the ‘other side’ of this properly with this comment. Being ‘practiced’ at being a patient makes me a poor anthropologist in this situation!! Thank you 😘
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February 9, 2016 at 3:31 pm
Thanks Lisa. Yours was full of angles to consider.
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February 8, 2016 at 4:12 pm
Powerful flash, Lisa. Dumping impossible and painful choices on people is the opposite of empowering, but a way of letting those in positions of authority dodge their responsibilities. Of course, as you say, it’s not all easy having someone’s life in your hands and doctors are merely human, although they may quite enjoyed being treated like gods. But those pseudo-choices plague us right across our lives – very trivial in comparison to your example, but I certainly don’t feel empowered by the facility to choose between fifty types of breakfast cereal.
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February 8, 2016 at 4:28 pm
Ah yes.. Did you ever study Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) and his idea of socially created needs? That might not be quite the right phrase but that notion everyone has of needing a microwave or a giant TV or as you say, needing a choice between a ridiculous number of breakfast cereals. 😀
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February 8, 2016 at 4:31 pm
No, I haven’t had the pleasure, but certainly makes sense.
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February 8, 2016 at 4:06 pm
Great take on the prompt! Love it (even if it’s sad…you know I that doesn’t bother me). ❤️
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February 8, 2016 at 4:09 pm
I seek to serve the melancholics! Thank you for getting here so quickly xx
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