Joined at the Karmic Hip

One of the coolest things about family practice is the opportunity to take care of people for a long time, through various stages of their lives. Birth, death; marriage, divorce; friendship, estrangement, and often back again. It can be a wild ride, this thing we call Life(tm).

There's a patient I met over fifteen years ago. Ten years ago she got married, and her husband started coming to me as well. After about five years they divorced, and both of them have continued to come see me.

Here's something royally freaky: even now, years after their divorce (amicable, but it's not like they're in regular contact with each other) whenever one of them calls the office, the other one inevitably calls too. Often the same day; sometimes within the hour.

The calls are always appropriate; each has individual (albeit quite different) issues. It is entirely possible that we disproportionately remember the times they both call while forgetting many other occasions when one calls but not the other. Certainly this is the kind of thing that can be put down to coincidence, a phenomenon that occurs with far more regularity than is intuitively obvious to the oddly wired human brain.

But I don't think so.

It's like they're still joined somehow; through me.

Freaky.