Further Confessions of a GP

Tarig II

It had been a few months since I had last seen Tarig and failed yet again to persuade him to agree to take HIV medication. Unexpectedly, I had a request to urgently phone his wife. I didn’t know Tarig’s wife well as she rarely came in to see me, but I often wondered what she made of his decision to not treat his HIV. She herself had tested negative to the disease and had, on the surface at least, stuck loyally by her husband’s side. She must have known that his decision not to have treatment was effectively a choice to commit suicide.

‘Doctor, please come. Tarig is confused and unwell.’

As I arrived, his wife greeted me at the door.

‘Doctor, please don’t mention the HIV in front of the children. They don’t know,’ she whispered.

Tarig was in bed looking pale and unwell. He was saying some words in a language that I took to be Arabic, but his wife assured me that he was confused and making no sense. It was clear that Tarig was really sick. Once the immune system becomes very weak, numerous types of infection can take hold and I wasn’t sure which one was making Tarig so unwell. Severe forms of pneumonia and meningitis are common, but regardless of which infection had taken hold, he clearly needed to go to hospital. In any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have thought twice about calling an ambulance for such a severely unwell man in his 40s. With Tarig, though, we had spoken on numerous occasions about his specific wishes not to be treated for his HIV. In hindsight I wish we had put together some sort of living will or something in writing to prepare for this very situation. We hadn’t, so I had to make a decision. Tarig’s wife and two teenage children were in floods of tears. There was no way that I could leave him at home to die. He was now too confused and unwell to refuse hospital admission, so I went against my patient’s previously expressed wishes and dialled 999.

These decisions are really tricky. If a person is actively suicidal and threatening to jump off the nearest building, they can be ‘sectioned’ (compulsorily detained in a psychiatric hospital) and incarcerated against their will for their own safety. Tarig’s refusal to take medication to treat his HIV was equally suicidal in its nature, but he wasn’t mentally unwell. He fully understood the implications of his actions and although most people would feel that this decision was wrong, there is no law against being wrong. The alternative to leaving him to die would be to lock up Tarig against his will and to hold him down and force him to take medication every day. I’ve seen this done in psychiatric units and it is frightening and brutal to watch. Severely mentally ill patients are only forced to take medication for a short period of time because they are so unwell that in their psychotic state they have no concept of what is real and what isn’t. They don’t have the ability to weigh up decisions rationally. The same couldn’t be said for Tarig. He had been calm and rational during our previous conversations and well aware of the implications of the decision he was making. Right now, though, he wasn’t well and as he had lost the ability to make a rational decision, I made one for him.

I worried about the ethics of that decision for some time afterwards. However, after spending some time in hospital, Tarig was discharged home and to my amazement he was voluntarily taking HIV medication. ‘I had a lot of time to think in hospital and I decided that God wasn’t ready for me to die just yet,’ he explained.

‘Good,’ was all I decided to say in response. He neither thanked me nor criticised me for my decision to send him to hospital that day and so we never discussed it.

Over the previous year I had engaged Tarig in numerous theological debates and completely failed to persuade him that God didn’t want him to die. Clearly it took his own near-death experience for him to come to this conclusion himself. I’m just relieved that he did.