A doctor who cared

Do you hide your impairments by joking around? Caleb Gardner writes at Lapham's Quarterly about a doctor named George. George cared deeply about his patients, and had a wonderful ability to communicate with them.

Gardner writes,

Comedy thrives on contradiction, and the absurdity of life is particularly refined in the hospital. Doctors discuss breakfast as they open someone’s sternum with a bone saw, a delirious patient demands green Jell-O, and an old man dying of neurovascular disease smiles longingly at the woman drawing blood from his arm while his son watches hopefully for those very mannerisms that inflicted silent damage throughout his childhood. Laughter, it seems, is one of the few genuine reactions one can have to such a paradoxical world. But it can be deceiving.

As he spoke to us that day, I thought more about his blunt humor. “Humor is not resigned,” Sigmund Freud said, “it is rebellious.” To me, it seemed that George cared more strongly about other people than anyone else on the team. His humor, sharpened by rage, was a rebellion against an environment where tests and imaging take the place of physical contact, and where computer screens replace human interaction. It was a rebellion against a powerful industry that hides its pettiness and hypocrisy under a thin but seemingly impenetrable veneer of euphemism and empathy. And, to some degree I felt, it was a self-defeating struggle against his own inability to embrace a system that may well be taking patient care, however stumblingly, in the right direction.

The affect he was thus sparing himself was sadness. For it is often easier to be angry than sad, and beneath George’s satire I saw a wound that, even then, I felt might be opening in myself. But on this day he allowed himself some sorrow. “I should have seen it, Caleb,” he said to me in the hall outside of our patient’s empty room.

Thanks to Conor Friedersdorf for linking to Gardner's article.