Every few months, Jerry and I fly out to California (no longer a fun thing to do in current travel conditions) to get neuropathy treatments for me. The treatment, available only at a clinic out there, is innovative and appears to ameliorate my present walking handicap in modest but incrementally noticeable degrees. It’s a newly developed protocol that may now be near the stage of getting approved for insurance coverage. If that happens, it will become available to a wider public and more widely known. The transition to that new stage is partly under way now and may explain some of what happened during my five days of treatment last week.

My cordial relations with the whole dedicated neuropathy treatment team had been one of the aspects of the care provided that I particularly cherished. They all cared. They respected each other’s professionalism and dedication. They approached the conditions to be treated with skill and their patients with kindness. That the treatments led to measurable improvement, in statistically significant numbers of patients, is clear from the pending upgrade.

That being the context, it will be clear why the incidents I’m about to describe were so disconcerting.

The poet Francis Thompson writes some lines to remind our secular age that –

The angels keep their ancient places

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces

That miss the many-splendored thing.

If, as the poet claims, the “angels keep their ancient places,” so too – though he does not write about it – do the devils!

Let me illustrate. In the clinic’s transition phase of expansion, the staff is being asked temporarily to divide its working time between the facility I know and a new one about an hour’s drive away. As is the way with transitions, not everything runs as smoothly as it once did. Nor can every real-time decision wait for the whole staff to consider and accept it. In my own case, I was handed off to a Second Therapist (hereafter ST) different from the Creative Founder (CF) by whom I’m usually treated.

So how did that go? For the two hours that I dealt with ST, he explained to me why I was unlikely to experience any cumulative benefit from the clinic’s neuropathy treatments! To back this up, he gave what sounded like an expert’s enumeration of what he said were all the relevant factors in my case. The impression ST left was that CF, his boss, had been trading on placebo effects and grandiose hopes. Hopes persuasive but hollow – except in the case of people in whom the neuropathy was far less advanced than it was in my case. 

What effect did ST’s private message have on me? Predictably, devastating. There is something in the human cognitive apparatus that accords to bad news more credibility than good news. Besides, wasn’t ST the colleague most trusted by CF, the institute’s founder with whom I normally worked? And wasn’t it credible that the CF’s creative optimism could have carried him to the point of projecting a range of applicability for his discovery – for his innovative treatment – greater than the evidence in fact warranted?

On the following day, CF was my therapist. Of course, I asked him about every objection raised by ST – only taking care to credit these objections to an unnamed third party, someone who might have been a bystander without connection to CF’s team. CF found each and every objection laughably out of date and uninformed. None of the objections had been seriously raised since the 1970’s. Unruffled and consistent, CF then went over my case, in broad outline and in detail, giving his reasons for each step he had taken, including specific adjustments and revisions, as his own grasp of the systemic problems deepened. Both Jerry and I listened and were able to confirm from our own observation the recent step-by-step symptomatic changes he described as he’d come to a better understanding of the peculiarities of my case.

By that evening, Jerry and both felt satisfied with CF’s explanations as well as what I could confirm experientially. I said to Jerry that ST may have had other reasons, possibly connected to the pending expansion (which could lead him to leave the team) to translate personal discomfort into his weird undermining of my trust in the therapy itself. 

Thursday, when I was again entirely in the hands of ST, the sessions passed without any more undermining “confidences” of the sort I’d been given on Tuesday.

On Friday, the final day, I was again scheduled to work with CF – save for a brief interruption for a meeting, during which time ST would take over. What could go wrong? Only this: when CF returned, ST did not step back from the treatment table. Instead, he conveyed, by body language, that he was not going to relinquish control. Rather than confront his subordinate, CF decided to say that he’d be back when ST had completed the particular treatment modality ST was then employing, which would take another twenty minutes to complete. But when, after twenty minutes and CF returned, ST finally stepped back from me, he did not step out of the room! Much to my surprise, he lingered in the entrance chatting over my head with CF, about subjects unrelated to my treatment process and plainly irritating to me. When, at one point, I asked him to leave, he did not leave. And CF did not insist that he do so. ST stayed until the treatment ended – which it did earlier than had been promised. Jerry, who’d expected to be present for the final review and homework instructions, was surprised that all was over by the time he returned.

On Tuesday, ST had shaken my trust in the Creative Founder’s therapeutic credibility. After Wednesday, my confidence was restored. On Friday, ST jeopardized my trust in the Creative Founder’s moral reflexes – what you might call “character” – the normative fitness that we all strive for. It’s one of the fragile “extras” that grace a human life. It can be lost, irreparably. Or, after a loss, it can be recovered. That’s the romance of life.

* * *

That evening, our hotel was hosting an extended family assembled for a wedding in the beautiful, multicolored dress of their native India. For a moment, Jerry and I watched the bride and groom as they posed for the photographer, looking fully the part of hero and heroine in the eternal romance of the world.

It made clear the real trouble with what had happened that week at the clinic.

It spoiled the romance of the world.