By Jose Jesus Zaragoza, Clewiston News

CLEWISTON -- Many years ago, Dr. James Forbes and one of the hospital administrators, a “tough ol’ gal,” simply came to he understanding that they would lock horns.  He treated her and once had her sent to the hospital when her blood pressure had shot up. It was there that Dr. Forbes saw a thing which shook him -- and despite a memory that now and then is lost in a small fog -- he still remembers the moment. “While I was talking to her, she started a sentence and couldn’t finish it. She had a stroke and never said another word after that.”

She had a nice home in Clewiston, and Dr. Forbes made it a point to visit her each month, never failing to drive to make the appointments with his old friend. He checked her blood pressure and communication was limited to the expression of her eyes. She died four years after her stroke, but Dr. Forbes never forgot about that day in the hospital. “I had to just sit there and watch that lady’s brain deteriorate right in front of me. It was the most helpless feeling in my life. She never said another word.”

45 years
In Dr. Forbes’ life, his occupation saw him constantly tending to the division between life and death. A doctor’s role in a community is clear, and about that much Dr. Forbes was always cognizant. Like the 5,000 residents of the West Indies he would treat at the peak of the sugarcane season, Dr. Forbes’ work was steeped in hard labor - the differences between back-bending beneath the sun in the fields, and the slow-marching hours in the clinic being slight.

After nearly 45 years of private practice and work at the local hospital, he is one of the old staples of the community. He has helped those who were sick get better, or helped to comfort those who became too ill, and did not get better.

During his residency, Dr. Forbes arrived at the county hospital in Jacksonville expecting to be one of 24 interns. The fact was that there were only eight. “I’m gonna get three times as much experience as I would have,” the young doctor thought. And so started a long career filled with longer days; One that until much recently, he had detested thinking about giving up.

During his career, he treated everyone from U.S. Sugar executives to residents of much meager means, and he enjoyed his calling. He rallied younger doctors to resist the notion that they must not take personal interests in their patient’s lives and poured his all into his work. He may have done so forever, but it was not meant to be.

 “The decision was made for me.”

Eventually, the effects of his profession were becoming clear. “It started bang like that, and it ended bang like that. One day you have more work to do than three doctors can do, and the next day, you have nothing to do. I found myself becoming depressed.” It was after one of those “dog-tired” nights last year, July 16 to be precise, when the doctor did not make it in to the office the next day. “I went to bed that night and, physiologically, I was about 55 or 60 years old. That was in my own mind. When I woke up the next morning, I had the mentality of an 80-year-old person and the physical ability of an 80-year-old person.” Like the friend he cared for until the end, the doctor had suffered a stroke.

Today, Dr. Forbes has lost half his vision in both eyes as a result of the stroke, and although he can make out the words in a book, he has trouble making sense of prose. He still reads medical journals, but prefers to stick to the summaries of the findings rather than trek through the hard details. But it is his memory that has suffered. The stroke has left it fragmented, and asked what his mind veers to during his quieter moments of reflection, he shares that there is much that he still considers. “I think about what happened ten years ago, 20 years ago. I can’t remember what happened yesterday, but I can remember what happened back then.” He continues to make progress and takes his medicines daily, like any good doctor, and surprises his wife when he remembers things that even she had forgotten.

 “I think it was God slowing me down. I was real tired and I had a bad siege for a couple of months. I just had more work to do than I could do and I didn’t know how to walk away from it. When I woke up and realized I had had a stroke and I could still think, I felt like God, he was protecting me. He got me out of the trap I was in.”

 A new morning in Maine

Taken as a whole, each day of his decades of medical practice, Dr. Forbes’ wife might sum it all up clearer than even the doctor himself: He would leave his home well before the sun would set in the sky, leaving many times before 5 a.m., and often would not return until late in the evening. But she did not keep him from doing what he loved. “I could have asked him (to retire), but it wouldn’t have done any good. When you live in a small town like this, and everybody knows you, he couldn’t tell anybody no. He never told anybody no. He may have been very, very tired, but he’d always go.” Even at her friends’ constant urging, Mrs. Forbes rarely knew if they were attending that latest social event until the last minute because of her husband’s work.

The hours in between their encounters could have been enough to drive a wedge into their relationship, but somehow, the Forbes made do with the pace of their lives. “Don’t misunderstand me, we’ve had our problems, every married couple does, but we came through it. A lot of times, you would think that living such separate lives, him at the hospital, me here with the children, that when it came down to being just the two of us here together, we wouldn’t know what to do. But we know what to do.” She loves him. And that much is clear. “He’s my husband. He’s a very caring person, sincere. He tells it like it is, and he puts his patients first.”

They married when she was 17, and he was 18; Sharing the experience of medical school, and the Air Force, settling down in Clewiston from Ocala, raising their children, and growing old together. So now they must take up the plan of growing older together. Mrs. Forbes drives him everywhere they go now, although the doctor stresses that if “push comes to shove,” he could drive just as well.

They enjoy the simple things: He hunts and fishes, and they are ashamed to say they aren’t the types to travel the world. They return frequently to a spot in Maine instead of venturing elsewhere. Although they’ve been there many times, the doctor still looks forward to seeing another morning in Maine. He is sure he will.

Despite his physical condition, and with his wife by his side, he assures: “To me, anyway, this past year has been the best year of my life.”

 “Thank you”

On Monday, the second day of his retirement, the doctor pondered what it felt like not to work. “Actually, it feels pretty good,” he said. He remains grateful to the community, saying a simple “thank you” to all those who ever knew him and trusted him enough to have him provide for their care. Least of all no one should feel sorry for Dr. Forbes, since it is clear by the manner, and with what excitement he relays stories, that he has led a full life. If he knew it were all to end tomorrow, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. “I don’t fear death at all. Not in the slightest.”

He still has the option of renewing his medical license when it expires in January, and has thought about whether he should so he can watch over the people who are closest to him. “If I have to go through whole lot of trouble, I won’t.”

He regrets that he may be one of the last symbols of the medicine he once had a romantic notion of pursuing. In his later years, he noted how doctors were changing amid the confusion of technology. Medicine today is much more impersonal, he laments. “Occasionally, these young doctors, occasionally they’d come and ask me something, but they were reluctant to do it. That’s just pride. That’s alright, it didn’t bother me at all. I understand it.”

And the doctor’s memory is strong. With his last days as a doctor drawing to a close, Dr. Forbes remembered one of his old classmates. Drawing on the speech General Douglas MacArthur delivered before a joint session of Congress in 1951, as his own military career finished -- “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away” -- Dr. Forbes thinks about his old friend and what he would say, and smiles widely in repeating it.

“Old doctors never die,” he says. “They just smell that way.”

News Editor Jose Zaragoza can be reached at jzaragoza@newszap.com.