Exchange of Realities

Without them we might lose our battles, or merely spend weeks between them recovering. Without them our stories would be darker. We know them even in the real world—less power, yes, but more training and dedication.

Here’s to our healers!

They can be the easiest to play but the hardest to play well, particularly when not in a leading role. Some forget that compassion is not required, others that those who put you together know best how to take you apart. Others forget life beyond healing. So many such characters branch from the same story.

And yet for those for whom healing is life, motivation is easy to arrange. Give them a plague, they’ll seek to remove it. Give them a source of pain, they’ll seek to end it.  Give them a group to keep alive, or sometimes to bring back when the first task has proven too hard, and they’ll do so.

In our own world as well as those we create, we owe them. Who here has never been aided by doctor nor nurse, or never treated in some way for some ill? For nights spent on call, for days juggling patients, for the hours of their own miracles and the broken rests after their failures; for calm bedside manners in times of stress, humor sent against desperation; for confidentiality, for dedication, for knowledge of what must be done, we salute them.

Here’s to our healers!

For those of us writing and not gaming, they are perhaps the hardest to write, as we need to know what form their healing takes, and to have a decent understanding of how the body works and what can fix it. But we include them anyway, making order from chaos, engaging in tug-of-war with death and winning. We write them as healers for the body, and they chase the ills away; we write them for the mind, and they bring their patients back from circular thoughts and emotional freefall.

But we must respect them. It’s easy to say that magic makes the healer’s job easy, but where’s the story in that? Why should one touch repair a wound, or one word heal a heart? Make of their art the craft that it is, or the battle that it can be. Remember the slow recoveries, the fleeting rewards, the parts where hope strains and stubbornness carries the day. Remember forced cheer and everpresent stress, and that never-ending need to rewrite time for the sake of the patients. Remember that a healing can be just as much a quest as any cross-country travel, and just as much a fight as the most epic of battles. Your world will be the better for it.

Here’s to our healers!

For those, the most-needed, the least-remembered, I propose a toast.

For our Bartons and Blackwells and Nightingales! For our Pomfreys and Keishas! For our White Mages and Durkons and Suns! For the fellow who decided to cover the cleric role, for the one with five dots in Medicine or the long-suffering Wood Dragon user! For those who keep us on our feet when we can’t stay out of trouble!

Here’s to our healers!

For Daniel Hoagland, 1953-2008.  Here’s to my healer.