Transition

I found myself looking in the mirror last tuesday.  I thought I looked different, but didn’t feel so.  To tell you the truth, I didn’t feel anything, I just chuckled at myself.  I’m not sure why that was the reaction.  Maybe it felt natural, but why should it have?  Maybe I’m just not one for entitlement.  Whatever the case, I was staring at myself, in my white coat, stethescope around my neck, collared shirt and sweater underneath.  On a most elemental level, thats not me. But it was. It is.

I know it is because the Friday before, Nov. 16, I found myself sitting on the board of the Temple University Hospital Ethics Committee with our guest, Dr. Rita Charon of the Columbia University School of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.D., Ph.D who was also scheduled to give the Keynote speech later that evening at our White Coat Ceremony.  Who do they see that allows me to even be sitting amongst such accomplished academics?  I felt like a forgery or authority.

Nonetheless, I got to listen to the creator of Narrative Medicine, an entire field devoted to the narration of the physician’s experience;  whether on a basic relfective level, the level of a factual account, one of inquisition, or even to the point of phenomenological examination.  I can imagine it sounds cheesy compared to the precision and complexity requisite to the tradition of the medical sciences.  How cheesy, adding the humanities and art into medicine.  All those useless humanities courses taken in college just “to get them out of the way.”  How absurd, humanism in medicine…

The College of Physicians and Surgeons sends their students to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on assignment.  I know my father would be furious if I was a student Columbia Med spending my time meandering the exhibit halls of the Met.  What for?  Purpose.  Why.  Purpose, setting the structure for all that we do, leaving no space to just do (though this is an entire other digression that I will not delve into at this moment).  Our job as physicians is to be observant; we are trained to see and absorb as much information at a visual level (in addition to others) as possible.  Go look at a Picasso.  What do you see?  What can you abstract from abstract art?  What is there?  Art in Medicine, training the eye to pierce the surface, to navigate what is present, and, more importantly, what is not.

In my previous entry I spoke about exceeding in life on a structure not traditional to “success”.  Exceeding through creation.  Dr. Charon carved out an entire new field of Medicine herself.  Awards and Ribbons eventually go to waste in storage boxes.  She created something.  She made medicine a part of her life, the other part a Ph.D in English, and found a space where the two fused and precipitated a field that more and more students and physicians alike are yearning for.  I have a passion (if you cannot tell by now) not for balance, but for harmony, between philosophical inquiry and medical science, which for so long have been mutually exclusive entities.  A heart and lung tansplant surgeon was at the meeting, and he expressed the same yearning.  Here is a man trained to the highest degree, a master of his craft, who finds himself no longer interested in the dynamics of procedure, but in the non-physical interior of the patient.  What has he truly done to help his patients?  He may have fixed some machinery, but telling by his tired, deep-set eyes, he may have come to a reality that most of his efforts are in vain if he cannot read what is hidden in the deepest corners of patient’s persona.  A void science cannot fill. How scary.

I found Dr. Charon after the ceremony and thanked her, still feeling funny in my starched coat.  She put her hands on the lapels of my jacket, here eyes piercing mine, looking into me as if she knew me all my life.  She fixed the collar and said, “Look at you, you’re there.”  I’ll never forget that moment. It was a verification, a confirmation of my place in the field.  The ceremony itself had no real effect on me, but at that moment, her words elicited a reaction so visceral I can still relive it today with the utmost clairvoyance.  A pure mental marker in my life.  Absent from then until forever, but ever so present in my everyday.