Reverend Richard Coles

Reverend Richard Coles

I used to have a parishioner – I’ll call him Pete – whose life was chaotic, sometimes spectacularly chaotic, thanks to the extravagant cocktail of alcohol and psychoactive drugs he used to make his existence bearable, if not always easy. From time to time, this would lead to hospitalisation and, because he liked me, I would accompany him to A&E, each time longing that the wait would be short, the assessment straightforward, the admission unproblematic. I liked him too – his honesty, his comedy, his paradoxical self-possession through self-destruction – but he was really hard work sometimes and I was impatient with him too often, and too quickly.

One night, he was even more than usually distressed and I found myself sitting with him in a bay in A&E waiting for a doctor as he got crazier and crazier, tearing the cannula from his arm, raving, playing with the oxygen and then running for the exit so he could have a fag. Eventually, in the small hours, we got him admitted to a ward and I sat with him to see if he would settle, though I was so tired and so fed up with his relentless delusional commentary, all the more exhausting for the moments of surprising insight that were characteristic of him in extreme distress. Never a dull moment with Pete; but he was more than I could handle that night, and when a young doctor arrived I thought he might just sedate him and, duty done, I could go home.

But he did not do that. Instead, he asked Pete how he was – not an unusual question from a doctor to a patient – but there was something in the way he said it, something about him, that halted the flow..

Pete was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Are you a man of faith?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor.

He was of Asian heritage and had a beard, and from his name I assumed he was a Muslim. Pete could be less than fully inclusive in his sympathies and I braced myself for a tirade, but it did not come. He opened his mouth to speak but the young doctor just looked at him so steadily, so calmly, with such frank sympathy, that he said nothing. They looked at each other in silence for a while and then they started to talk, really talk, and before long the doctor was sitting cross-legged on the bed, facing Pete, who was suddenly calm and eloquent and gradually at peace. He fell asleep.

The doctor wished me well and went on to his next patient. I thanked him, but I thought inadequately, because I knew I had witnessed something quite extraordinary, and – in all honesty – felt some shame that the doctor had found a way into Pete’s distress that I had not. The weirdest thing was that, as I walked through the car park to go home, I tried to recall what the doctor had said but could not remember a single word. The moment I tried to summon it from my memory it disappeared.

I will support the NHS with everything I’ve got, because it exists to provide medical care for all of us, as best it can; because of the skill and professionalism of those who work in it; because it needs protecting from people who think it a cost-occasioning indulgence (at least until they need it). But I love the NHS because of what that doctor did for my parishioner on a dark night, in a hard-pressed hospital, in an undistinguished town, where miraculous care unexpectedly happened.

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