Dialogue: Disgraced doctor saved my life

By GARTH GEORGE

It's been a sad and disappointing week, one way and another. It's never pleasant to see people you've held in high regard fall or jump off their pedestals.

I'm not much concerned about Coutts and Butterworth.They are simply nautical mercenaries for hire to the highest bidder. My deepest disappointment came with the conviction after guilty pleas of Dr Morgan Fahey, the Christchurch GP and former deputy mayor, on charges of sexual assault on female patients spread over 34 years.

Because that man was instrumental in saving my life.

Back in September 1975 I was working - well, employed anyway - in Wellington, living in a fleabag private hotel and suffering the increasing chaos and horrors of out-of-control drinking.

Next thing I was in Christchurch - and to this day have no recollection of how I got there, though it must have been by air - holed up in the spare bedroom of my elderly parents' small central-city flat. I was sick unto death - unable to get out of bed, unable to keep any food down, even boiled water, unable to sleep, shaking and shivering and with a mind like a can of worms.

My mother, beside herself with worry, remembered that I had once consulted Dr Fahey, and telephoned him at his busy central-city practice.

The first I knew of this was when Dr Fahey arrived in my room - making a house call, which even in those days was almost unheard-of, to a man he had seen only briefly once before, and on a Friday night to boot.

He took only minutes to diagnose my condition - chronic, death's door alcoholism, of which I learned later he had had some intimate, though not personal, experience. He said he'd be back the next day and sure enough arrived on the Saturday morning with a note to have me admitted to the Salvation Army's Bridge Programme in Addington.

I wasn't there when he called. I knew nothing of it until my father's walking stick curled round my arm in a nearby tavern as I sipped on the only medicine I knew that might make me feel better.

Thus did my second chance at life begin. I was admitted on Dr Fahey's recommendation to the Bridge Programme and there, for the next three months, began the long, slow and painful climb back to health, sanity and, ultimately, the restoration of my manhood.

And by that I mean a restoration of my capacity to be a man in the society in which I live - a father, a son, a brother, a husband, a friend, a journalist, all those things which define me as a human male.

And there came, too, slowly and surely, the renewal in my spirit as God gently, kindly and forgivingly drew me to himself and led me into fellowship with others similarly afflicted from whom I have derived, and still derive, much wisdom, great reassurance and comfort.

I know today that it was divine intervention that brought Morgan Fahey to my parents' door on that Friday night nearly 25 years ago.

The proof is quite plain: I haven't tasted alcohol since that fateful Saturday - September 27, 1975 - an anniversary I observe each year with considerably more gratitude than my natural birthdays, of which by now I have had far too many.

A year or so ago, when the allegations against Dr Fahey first surfaced, I wrote to him to thank him for his lifesaving service to me, and received a gracious reply.

I'm sure I'm not the only one for whom Dr Fahey has provided a high standard of medical care. There must be many others to whom he brought comfort and healing in times of great suffering and need.

But that, unfortunately, in the minds of most people, will not be what he will be remembered for. He will be remembered as a sinister sexual predator, a deeply flawed man who flagrantly betrayed his sacred healer's oath.

When I read of his guilty pleas this week and of the certainty that he will spend time in prison, the funereal words of Mark Anthony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar came unbidden to mind:

The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.

Sad, but true.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz