Missed signals

Peter Strazs was a young man from Prague, a lonely, friendless lad who signaled  his cultural sensibility when he likened himself and his situation to something out of Kafka. He said his grandfather had known Franz Kafka, and he, Peter Strazs, knew Kafka's tiny cottage just below Prague Castle (years later Wendy and I visited Kafka's cottage, saw for ourselves how tiny it is).  Peter Strazs worked in one of the small manufacturing plants in the neighbourhood, spent his weekends rambling in the Adelaide hills or, in wet weather, in the Art Gallery of South Australia. With much help from the surgically qualified senior partner in the group, I took out his inflamed appendix, and got to know him a little better during his postoperative recovery. Culturally we had much in common, as Wendy and I felt we did also with our German immigrant friends, Dodie and Harald Ziemer. I invited Peter to join us one evening in late summer 1959, but when I said our other guests were migrants from Germany, he shuddered, said he didn't like Germans, and declined. About then he repeatedly tried to see me at home, but Wendy protected me with determination from out-of-hours callers at the front door, until one day he saw me in the hall behind Wendy, called out that he had a gift for me. He produced the water colour of ghost gums in Central Australia that has hung on our wall since that day.  I wish we had invited Peter in that day, instead of thanking him in a rather perfunctory way and dismissing him. I saw him twice after that. The first time he said he had to see me urgently: his loneliness was worrying him badly, he said.  He came to the clinic when I was midway through repairing a severe laceration but I put down my forceps and threaded needle, told him I was very busy, as he could see. He could either wait, or come back next day. I gave him a prescription form with my name, next day's date and a time when I could see him. I saw him for the final time about midnight the same day when the police found this prescription form, asked me to identify his body. He had put a shot-gun barrel in his mouth and blown off the top of his head. His face was unrecognizable but the recently healed scar from the appendectomy, and a hairy pigmented birthmark on his belly were unmistakeable. The wall behind his body was decorated with a well chosen selection of prints from the Art Gallery, many now spattered with blood and bits of his brain. The books in the bookshelf opposite the bed on which his body lay, included volumes of poems in Czech and English, Kafka's The Trial, Metamorphosis, and Amerika, in German and English, and other works that identified him as a genuine intellectual. I cried as I looked at his books and the blood-spattered prints. I had dismally failed this young man, completely missed the distress signals he had tried desperately to transmit to me. Seeing his body, reflecting on how my failure to detect his distress signals had led to his death, gave me a powerful motive to learn more than I knew at that time about how the mind works, some of the things that can go wrong with it, and how modern medicine and psychiatry might be able to put things right. It's a poor sort of memorial, but I thought of Peter Strazs, and still think of him and my calamitous missed diagnosis, whenever I look at the water colour of ghost gums that he gave me, whenever I'm studying anything about how the human mind works.