Mrs Krige never forgot my birthday. Ten years of small gifts and shared laughter — and a reminder that medicine is not an exact science but a dance in which two beings find a song that works.
I am not sure how long she has been coming to see me as her preferred doctor. Perhaps 10 years, perhaps longer. Her folder is fat with information, and I probably know more about her than most members of her family.
Mrs Krige is 58 years old and claims to have been cured of her ME syndrome when she started coming to see me. Certainly her symptoms of extreme tiredness and body aches and pains slowly disappeared, much to her relief. After years and years of ill health without a diagnosis (ME was not well recognised in those early days), she was so relieved to finally have a diagnosis that I sometimes like to think that it was having a diagnosis that switched the healing process on.
