And he’s on the table and gone to code/ And I do not think that anyone knows/ What they’re doing here” -“Jumper,” Third Eye Blind
My mom delivered me in a hospital with no staff anesthesiologist, and her care was provided by a general practitioner, not an OB. The story goes that when the doctor asked what my name would be, “Adam,” the doctor repeated a “poem” he knew called,”Fleas”: “Adam had ’em.” That was Putnam County Hospital.
I was raised in Arizona for many important developmental years, from four years old until 12. A pastor’s kid (“PK”). After some time in Phoenix, our family moved to a small rental home in an affluent Scottsdale community, near the new church build my dad was leading, with tremendous support from mom. I was never much struck by this disparity between our 1,500 square feet and our neighbors’ 3,000. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to wealth is not by ordination.
My childhood best friend owned lazer tag vests, guns, and even the LT base. He had a Commodore 64 and Nintendo. So long as I managed to be a good friend and an entertaining guest, there wasn’t much need for me to have those things, too. (There’s something of neoliberalism to speak to here, but I’m not a political scientist.)
We moved back home to Indiana in the middle of my sixth grade year. That was a tough move.
In 1996, I started high school. I was too young to catch Nirvana’s Nevermind a few years earlier. Girls were using pencil erasers to create negative space on the covers of their Mead notebooks in the form of the flying W, representing Weezer, and Green Day would be my bus companion on the way home–where my route would take me by Whitney’s house (my now wife), but we were only passing acquaintances then. Besides, she had an older brother with a car.
I was bullied on that bus. I started skateboarding home. Skating traded in emotional bruises for physical.
By 1996 my Green Day interest fueled a deeper dive into whatever punk rock was accessible in the Midwest: Rancid, Anti-Flag, NOFX, and the skate punk, Lagwagon, Pennywise, the Descendants, and Screeching Weasel.
In 1998, many of us fell for Third Eye Blind. “Jumper” was one of those radio singles that, along with tracks from Foo Fighters, seemed to transcend high school niche communities.
This morning I washed breakfast dishes, and without prompting, I started singing, “I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.” Isaac, perceptive, always listening, was strolling around humming and piecing those words together. I called him over, and we listened to a few 3eb tracks. Throughout life we wrap ourselves in lies to our own detriment (“Cut ties, with all the lies, that we’ve been living in.”) This is poignantly so in high school, and so the lyrics of that song unified an adolescent spirit.
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I am active in medical eduction (#MedEd), on the periphery, anyway. I promote medical humanities, narrative medicine, or empathetic witnessing–there isn’t enough scholarship available yet to draw clear boundaries around sub-specialties, and this is probably good.
Being a patient advocate is an uphill road. There are receptive institutions, and receptivity increases more each lecture and conference, but fighting imposter syndrome is a struggle–what right do I have to teach these doctors? A senior resident has nearly a decade combined of undergraduate pre-med and med school training, not to mention 24 hour rotations through major departments, running codes, delivering babies, identifying pill-seeking behaviors, establishing relationships with patients while maintaining objective distance, and coming up with poems about newborns.
I have had glioblastoma for 22months. What right do I have to give a Grand Rounds? (Note: I haven’t given a Grand Rounds, so someone invite me!) I reflected with a friend recently on my strategy to engage a clinical audience. I talked about how hard I work to cultivate a medical vocabulary: to translate my experience into the physician’s vernacular. When discussing my diagnosis, I emphasize “histologic vs molecular pathology and classification of tumors.” I do not adjust my medications, I “engage in monitoring and medication self-titration.” I only rarely talk about “scans,” instead, “diagnostic imaging.”
The idea is this: to gain credibility in the healthcare space, I demonstrate my aptitude with jargon to earn my seat at your table. This is not only the patient’s burden, medical hierarchy itself is a power structure, where those with training, experience, and knowledge sit atop those with lesser of these.
The error I commit when accepting the encumbrance of fitting my language to yours is that we are somehow peers, and I must demonstrate thus to be respected, and only those who earn respect are listened to. That may be a problem of the dominator hierarchy rife in medicine, but, and I’m now coming to realize, this isn’t my problem to solve. Indeed, it is not a problem by which I am directly impacted, medical miscommunication and poor handling of complex cases, notwithstanding.
Stakeholders in a diverse project with shared aims need not be peers to be colleagues.
I do not speak the language of medicine. I speak the language of humanities. When the doctor in training was dissecting cadavers, I was reconstructing medieval arguments for god’s existence. Starkly contrasting research, one would think, but when viewed like this, mapping the body (med students) and understanding what our greatest thinkers have claimed about the purported deity that ostensibly designed it thus (philosophy students), the lines are blurred.
I aim to be competent in the language of medicine, but no longer to earn the respect of my practitioner audience, but to best understand the disease that plagues my body. The practitioner audience may learn my language, too, not to publish papers in professional philosophy, but to best understand the life-world of people under their care.
Doctors, we are not peers, but that does not entail we are not colleagues. We, each of us, seek to improve the lives of others, and in that pursuit, we have many shared aims. That is what we gain through shared language. Let’s move forward together, as colleagues. It takes expertise on both ends of the stethoscope to chart our future path.
After all, “Everyone has got a reason to put the past away.”