Some time ago when our young son was struck by agonising abdominal pains in the middle of the night and we had to rush him to Emergency at York Central Hospital in Toronto. In the four or five hours before he was attended to I felt the sort of helpless despair which must be the experience of countless thousands in this pitiless world when their loved ones are at deadly risk or dying or dead by accident or some other stroke of unrelenting fate.
It is the helplessness. It is the frustrated rage. It is the terrible feeling of being powerless. It is the questioning of God. Our son’s pain was unbearable, it took over his life, there was nothing but this great fierce God of pain. He begged his mother and myself to help him. But all I did – raging at the desk-bound bureaucrats, appealing to passing, harassed nurses – could not get him help before his turn. When at last he was admitted to the system of care my son was speedily and efficiently helped, his pain relieved at last with morphine, what was wrong deciphered and eventually in the course of a harrowing week and an operation all was well. But I will never forget his agony for those few hours and my despair. And it was just a few hours that seemed an eternity. I think of others in their despair – not hours but days, weeks, months, years, forever they have to endure.
