18 February 2026

A patient recalls being shot

I asked about significant past medical problems. “No. Unless you mean when I was five.” He patted his leg again. “I was shot here”

By Phil Whitaker

Heine had come for a “meet and greet”. These are a commonplace of Canadian general practice: an initial appointment for the GP to build a picture of a new patient’s medical history, and plan for issues that might need to be addressed.

With 86 years of life behind him, I imagined Heine would have quite a bit to tell me. But he was on no regular medication, and when I asked about significant past medical problems he had to think for a moment.

“Ah, well, I did have this hip replaced a few years ago.” He tapped his left thigh.

“Anything else?”

“No. Unless you mean when I was five.” Heine patted his leg again. “I was shot here.”

Surprise must have shown on my face. “I was born in Germany,” he explained. “I was sleeping in a turnip field. I must have made some noise, and the soldiers opened fire. They stopped as soon as they realised they’d shot a child.”

I glanced at the computer. He’d been born in 1939, so this would have been towards the end of the war. “These were German soldiers?”

“No, American. They took me to a field hospital. I had surgery to remove the bullets, two of them.”

This was so unexpected I had to know more. Heine and his elder sister were “wolf children” – orphans, or other children separated from their parents in the chaos of the Allied invasion, living in open country, surviving on what food they could scavenge. “I was in the hospital for two months,” he told me. “After that, they took me to this castle where they were keeping lots of children. I said to the woman, did she know my sister, and she said she’d heard of her and took me to this room and there she was.”

They stayed at the castle for two years, then one day they were summoned to the administrator’s office. “She asked if we knew these people,” Heine said. “We turned around and there were our parents.”

Heine’s words transported me from my 21st-century consulting room. I tried to grasp the turmoil he must have lived through; the utter confusion of war and its aftermath, the grief at losing his family; the joy he must have felt at being reunited – and the desperation and despair his parents must have endured during their years-long quest to discover their children’s fates. The family subsequently joined the quarter of a million Germans who emigrated to Canada after the war, seeking to build new lives.

It felt distinctly prosaic, but I had to return to medical matters. I checked his blood pressure and enquired who was at home. “My wife,” he said. “We’ve been married for more years than I can count. I look after her. That is now my life.” So began his second story, how his wife was bed-bound with brain damage following a car accident a decade before. “She was in a home to begin with,” he said. “But I didn’t like what they were feeding her, she was wasting away, so I said, no, she’s coming home with me.” For the past nine years he has provided 24-hour care, supported by their adult children, and carers who come in four times a day.

His pulse had been a bit irregular when I’d checked, a possible indication of atrial fibrillation (AF). Part of me was loathe to medicalise this augustly self-reliant man. But AF, were it to be present, carries a stroke risk, which can be greatly reduced by anticoagulation. He nodded thoughtfully when I explained why I thought we should do some blood tests and an ECG.

In the end, his heart trace showed nothing untoward, and his blood results looked like they belonged to someone half his age. I was delighted to tell him the news. He may have got nothing out of it, but Heine’s “meet and greet” left me with lots to ponder: how the world had changed so much over the course of his life, yet how much – dispiritingly – it feels like it’s the same. But above all else, the resilience of the human spirit in enduring it all.

[Further reading: In Olney, women limber up for the race of their lives]