Checkmate

“Hopefully you’ll make a better doctor than a chess player” he told me

Jonas was a young man who was stuck at the state psychiatric hospital, and I was his medical student.

Jonas was an only child who had grown up in a comfortable suburb of Springfield, Massachusetts, where mom and dad lavished chess tournaments, violin lessons, and other cultural luxuries upon their son. He was on the brilliant side and just few social skills shy of being a popular kid, when he was first diagnosed with a rare form of Muscular Dystrophy.

It wasn’t a life sentence in the same way that the more severe form of this illness could have been, and although he was more of a cerebral fellow than a budding soccer star, the fact that he would soon need help ambulating sent him into an emotional tailspin.

Jonas stopped many of his extracurricular activities, including chess tournaments and classical music concerts, refused to go to college, and finished off a bottle of pills from the bathroom cabinet in a sloppy suicide attempt, which landed him in the intensive care unit at the local children’s hospital.