Pablo Neruda, Patch Adams and Kaitlyn

I’ve always loved the movie Patch Adams and had not watched it in a long time. I’m kind of strange in the fact that since Kaitlyn died, I try to avoid most movies that have anything to do with doctors or medical students like the plague because it is just SO painful. She will never be one now and it hurts my heart so much.

There have been a few exceptions, and I don’t even know why they are, that I will watch. I watch “Dragonfly” and the doctor that dies in the movie is a woman. How can I bear that? I think it’s the element of an afterlife in the movie that makes me feel good.

A few weeks ago I watched Patch Adams again and gritted my teeth and braced myself before it came on because I knew it was painful. It’s a really good movie but it’s about a man that became a medical student after spending time in a psychiatric ward because he was suicidal. While there he discovered he wanted to help people and devote his life to it, so he ultimately got into med school as an older student. And he was funny and unconventional which is what made him famous. There is really a Patch Adams in the world.

It shows him in medical school where he met this pretty blonde medical student who wanted nothing to do with him at first because she spent all her time studying and she was very serious. He finally won her over though.

Don’t read farther if you’ve not seen this movie as I give away the ending.

They fell in love and started a free clinic. She was murdered while trying to help someone. He is mad with God and everything that happens to a person when they lose someone they love.

It was just a few minutes ago that I realized the poem he read to her was from Pablo Neruda, which was Kaitlyn’s favorite poet in the world. Her most favorite quote was one of his lines, “Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggles, iron, volcanoes.” I still have all her books of poetry of his here on her table in my living room. He was a very romantic poet. Kaitlyn loved romantic poetry.

So it was a sad movie, but somehow, I could watch it. And I thought of Kaitlyn.