My surgery door opened and a medium man walked in. Middle-aged, slightly overweight, not completely clean-shaven, neither tall nor short, thin hair but not bald, shorts, and light khaki shirt.
I wasn’t sure if it was his first appointment, so I introduced myself.
‘Tim Hopkins,’ I said.
He shook my hand and sat down. He didn’t tell me his name, but it was on my computer anyway. Robert Medley.
‘It’s Robert, isn’t it? How can I help you?’
‘Bob.’
‘So, Bob, what I can do for you?’
He smiled self-deprecatingly, as if to say it was really nothing much.
‘Got a touch of deja vu, doc. Started earlier this year. Never felt anything like it before.’
I hesitated and I probably frowned. That’s what I do, apparently.
‘What exactly does it feel like?’
He sighed quite loudly and sat back, hands on his medium paunch.
‘It’s like … you know … like I’ve seen it all before. Everything. Don’t feel like doing anything.’
I typed it into his record.
‘Got you,’ I said. ‘But usually people wouldn’t call that “déjà vu”. Let’s have a look…’
I reached for the dictionary that I keep on my shelf.
‘Deja vu’, I read. ‘The sense of having previously experienced something actually being encountered for the first time.’
I put the Macquarie down on my desk and looked back at him.
‘You know, that really strong feeling you get sometimes that you’ve been in exactly the same place or doing exactly the same thing. That’s not really what you’re feeling, is it?’
‘It’s like I said,’ he replied. ‘It’s like I’ve seen it all before.’
‘It’s funny,’ I said. ‘The French have a word for that, too.’
‘Bloody French,’ said Bob.
I flicked forward in the dictionary until I found what I was after.
‘Ennui. A feeling of weariness and discontent arising from satiety or lack of interest; boredom.’
‘That’s it,” he said. ‘Seen it all before.’
I took his blood pressure. Normal. We chatted for a minute or so. I made the usual noises about keeping in touch with friends and family, prescribed him some ancient-wisdom herbal quackery from the pharmacy, and suggested he come back in a month.
A month later, and I’d just finished with Mrs Drubetskoy. Her arthritis and her heart were playing up, but she was more obviously bothered by the lack of communication from her son in Sydney. That, I couldn’t help with. I closed her file and saw that Bob Medley was next. I thought I’d go out to fetch him from the waiting-room, but before I could do so, there was a knock and he poked his head around the door, smiling, before stepping in. He sat down.
‘How have you been, doc?’ he said.
‘Oh, I’m fine. What about you? How can I help you today?’
I presumed that it was a follow-up, but we’re trained to ask anyway.
‘Well, it turns out I was right all along.’
‘OK … tell me more.’
‘So the other day I went out into my yard, first thing. I live up on the rise, right, so I’ve got bush behind me and if I stand on a rock I can see the sea. It was the morning after that bloody cold night we had a couple of weeks back. So I sit down with my coffee on an old bench I’ve got out there. Before I know it, Willie Wagtail comes along, sits on a spade I’d left out, and chirps at me like he wants me to start digging. So I started to take a good look at him. Did you ever see that they’ve got this little white stripe, just above their eyes? What’s that for, do you think? Then the wind started up and the trees started swaying, and then it stopped again, and the sun on the leaves … they were just so green and shining. Beautiful, it was.’
‘Nice!’ I said.
‘And ever since then, it’s been the same. It’s like I’m seeing everything for the first time, although it’s not really the first time. Backwards deja vu, right?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘So before it must have been forwards déjà vu, right? Anyway, wanted to let you know that they worked, those pills. Carry on with them, you think?’
‘I would,’ I said. ‘The St John’s Wort, wasn’t it?’
‘You should try it, doc. Next time you get a bit of ennui with all these crook bastards you have to see.’
It was the first time a patient had given me a prescription, but it made me think a bit.
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