Forget PlayStation – try stories, kindness and ice cream instead

Review: Vivien Horler

Prescription: Ice Cream – A doctor’s journey to discover what matters, by Alastair McAlpine (Macmillan)

In 2018 Alastair McAlpine, a paediatrician based in Cape Town, found five minutes of fame.

He worked as a palliative care doctor, helping children with terminal illnesses to die more comfortably – both physically and mentally.

This is a gruelling speciality, because everyone feels it is wrong for children to die, and yet they do. If they and their families can be helped through the ordeal, it is a good thing.

One day he was talking to seven-year-old Evangeline, whose medication caused appalling nausea, which meant keeping her fed and hydrated was fraught.

But this day McAlpine found her sitting up in bed and colouring in, which she hadn’t had the energy to do for some time. Her cheeks were pink and she seemed remarkably cheerful. McAlpine wanted to know her secret.

“My dog, Rufus,” she replied. “The hospital let him visit me today.”

After a couple of questions, Evangeline told McAlpine Wonder Woman also made her happy, along with her mother reading to her.

He decided to make a point, over the next few weeks, of asking his young patients what made them happy, “the stuff that brought them joy and meaning; that reduced the pain and restored life. I wasn’t wholly prepared for the response”.

They told him it was stories, being read to, bad jokes (“there is no Dad joke too Dad-jokey for kids”), slapstick comedy, family and happy memories of time spent with family, kindness, letters from classmates, visits – and ice cream.

He realised they never said anything about social media or the latest PlayStation console.

McAlpine collated the responses he’d collected, and posted them on Twitter, a medium on which he occasionally received about 10 “likes” for his tweets.

By that evening the thread had collected 19 000 likes, and 45 000 by the next morning. News agencies and TV stations were trying to get hold of him. He was interviewed by the BBC, Sky and many radio stations.

There were of course naysayers, who accused him of cynically milking children’s pain “for superficial aphorisms”. Some of these remarks stung, and he stopped reading the comment section whenever he featured in a news article.

And then, suddenly, it was all over and people moved on, as did McAlpine himself, who accepted a job in Canada in infectious paediatric diseases (although he intends to return here eventually).

The lead to all this makes up the bulk of this memoir.

After taking a medical degree at UCT, McAlpine elected to become an intern at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, which turns out to have been a roller-coaster experience. There was a huge workload, not enough staff, endless hours on duty.

On his first day, when he asked where he could put his bag, he was told to carry it with him at all times, or it was likely to be stolen. He was also advised to take necessary stock from store cupboards whenever it was there, and carry that with him too – blood tubes, suturing material, needles because there was no guarantee that when he needed these items they would be available.

Reading this I thought, dodgy. What if his bag is searched and he’s accused of theft? Well, that happened too, though to a fellow intern. That was its own drama.

We discover early on that while a medical student at UCT McAlpine became an alcoholic, eventually being suspended from his studies while he went to rehab.  He was fortunate not to have entirely derailed his planned medical career.

We go with him through the painful rehab process, and his ultimate success in remaining dry. Determination, along with heavy metal, coffee, Coke and ice cream, helped him cope.

There is humour here, and a lot of suffering – by patients and McAlpine himself – but there is also courage and cheer, making this book thought-provoking and well-worth reading.

He ends: “I don’t know the key to happiness, but I do know that it isn’t found at the bottom of a bottle or the end of a syringe. You may just find it, however, sitting quietly with a child, eating your favourite ice cream.”

 

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