Bedside Stories: A Journey Built by Patients by Terry J. Hannan

   This short book documents a series of unique interpersonal human encounters between a physician Dr Terry Hannan and his patients. These encounters have occurred over a period of more than forty-five years of direct patient care as a physician in Internal Medicine and an interspersed 12-year interval as a Pallative Care physician.
   This personal journey highlights the profound depths of human encounters that can occur during the distress of people being unwell-physical disease or dis-ease (the latter describing those who have the physical manifestations of severe stress).
    The verbal and physical release from short or long-term inner torment has not only a profound effect on the patient (often healing) but also on those at the bedside who were willing to 'listen and read the signs'.
   The ability to 'listen' and allow the sufferer to be at ease with their clinical state is inherently a learnt process and at no stage in the medical professional's life does it become easier.
   It becomes an art only when the listener becomes at ease with their own humanity and their individual limitations.
   Quite often this intimate listening involves confronting one's own death or loss as well as that occurring in the patient.
   Why I as a physician have been able to be the conduit for the people in this book (and others I have treated) I cannot fully explain.
   I do know that I am more at ease with the tasks involved because those whose lives I touched also provided me with healing and eased my journey through life.
   While writing these words I am reminded of a personal incident as junior doctor in the 1970s when I was less wise and obviously did not recognise aspects of my own self.
   In an old army style open ward hospital, I was communicating with a patient when an elderly Greek man across the ward beckoned me to come and he said, "You are like the great Greek physician Asclepius (or Asklepios) because of your ability to listen."
   I hope I have fulfilled his definition of me.
   Dr Terry J. Hannan