There was a time when doctors felt like witnesses to our humanity.

When you walked into a room carrying pain and left feeling at least a little seen. When hands lingered longer than the ticking clock. 
When questions were asked not to hurry you along, but to understand you. Back then, it felt as though illness was something shared, not processed.
Today, something has shifted.
Now, you arrive not as a person first, but as a number. A time slot. A line on a screen. Your suffering is measured in minutes, your story condensed into codes and checkboxes. You sit with your pain folded neatly in your lap, waiting for permission to unfold it, only to be told there is no time.
You are not asking for miracles.
You are asking to be listened to.
There is something quietly devastating about having to justify your pain. About feeling as though your body is a problem to be solved quickly, not a life to be cared for. About explaining yourself again and again, hoping the next pair of eyes will soften, hoping the next voice will sound like it believes you.
And yet, even as I write this, gratitude sits beside the grief.
I am deeply grateful for the NHS. 
For the lives it saves every day. 
For the doctors and nurses who are still trying, still caring, still holding compassion in systems that make it harder and harder to do so. 
I know they are tired. I know they are stretched thin. I know many of them went into medicine with the same romantic hope we all carry, to help, to heal, to make a difference.
But the system is failing them.
 
And in doing so, it is failing us.
Care has become rushed. Conversations have become transactional. Healing has been reduced to efficiency. Somewhere along the way, medicine began to forget that the body is not separate from the soul, and that pain does not always present itself neatly or quietly.
There is a particular loneliness in being unwell in a world that no longer has time to sit with discomfort. In feeling as though you must perform your suffering correctly in order to be taken seriously. 
In leaving appointments feeling smaller than when you arrived, wondering if you asked for too much simply by asking for help.
What I miss most is the gentleness.

The sense that someone was walking with you through the uncertainty.

The feeling that your life mattered beyond the data.
Healing is not just prescriptions and referrals. 
It is being believed. 
It is being met with curiosity instead of skepticism. 
It is the simple, radical act of seeing the person behind the symptoms.
I still believe in medicine.
I still believe in care.

And I still believe we can do better.
But we must remember that people are not problems to be solved quickly. They are stories unfolding. 
They are fragile and hopeful and afraid. 
They are doing their best to survive bodies that sometimes betray them.
And all they are really asking for is to be treated not as numbers passing through a system, but as humans who are hurting, and worthy of tenderness.
Until next time,

Ta ta for now,

Yours, Lainey.

🤒