I'm Not a Doctor

I just listened to an amazing radio story on Public Radio Exchange (PRX). The producer is Lu Olkowski and the title is "I'm Not a Doctor, but I Play One at the Holiday Inn." In 35 hours of taping conversations with Dimitri, an ex-heroin addict who is trying to help active addicts by administering Ibogaine, the illegal hallucinogen that helped him kick the habit, Lu Olkowski never hears him speak ill of those he's trying to help. It's a phenomenal piece of editing and narration, which not only distills 35 hours into 16 minutes, but does it in unfalteringly clear tones. This story has a quality that brings compassion for addicts right down to its aching roots, and Dmitri, a wounded healer himself, is its heart. It's a profoundly spiritual story, probably because it's not trying to be.

And since it's Father's Day, and my father is a doctor (now retired), I am given to reflect on his life--as healer and as father. His ontological bearings could be said to be firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, especially his faith in reason (a faith he would describe as "fragile", as any faith should be), along with his beliefs in positivism and a godless universe. Sunday after Sunday, he spent hours tossing the football with me. Sundays were holy days--of a distinctly secular sort, mind you--because, almost without exception, they were the days my dad unstintingly and with rare exception devoted his time and attention to my brothers and sister, my mom, and me.

Relatively late in his career, a career in which he mostly practiced and taught thoracic surgery in academic settings, I realized that I'd never actually watched him perform his art. He and my mom always supported me in mine, often traveling across the country just to watch me run--from a string of Pikes Peak Marathons to various bush league mountain races in Utah or Colorado. So, a little less than twenty years ago, he arranged for me to "scrub" for an operation he would be performing a few days later on a woman who had esophagial cancer.

At first, as you might imagine, I was fascinated by the orchestration of the operating room and how these different parts--both human and technological--were sequenced in time according to algorithms that were foreign to me but almost second nature to the doctors and staff. I remember the anaesthesiologist being somewhat dour, as if he were experiencing some kind of sympathetic response to the drugs he administered. I remember the nurses being lively and quick, their eyes twinkling above their surgical masks. And since this was in a medical school, I remember the resident, capable and steady, though his self-confidence seemed unannealed and therefore welcoming of my father's guidance.

As the surgical team proceeded through their steps, I became less interested in the interactions between and among these human beings, both with each other and the technology they were using; and I also became less interested in how these interactions were structured in time, instead becoming more interested in the choreography of movements and sounds from moment to moment. I initially approached the experience as a sort of structuralist, but found my observations being transformed more and more into those of a phenomenologist.

I was expecting, as I say, to observe Dad practicing his art: his careful hands--at once steady, graceful, and quick--his patient manner with the resident and the staff. But I was moved most deeply by his art as a teacher. He was asking questions of the resident that actually seemed to help the resident clear his thought. Once, as he observed the resident preparing to deflate the patient's lungs, Dad simply asked, "Can you narrate for me the next several steps you are planning to take?" The resident seemed to catch himself in mid-thought, correct himself, and proceed. Dad simply said, "Wonderful! That's exactly right!" I had the impression Dad somehow intuited the resident's blurriness, hovering though it was just beneath the threshold of the resident's own consciousness, leaving the resident free to experience the thrill of discovery and his deepening self-confidence for himself.

Dad's art in the operating room reminded me also of a symphony conductor. He was acutely aware of everything going on around him--asking questions, making jokes, engaging everyone with his smiling eyes and gentle laughter--and also listening intently. I mean really listening, deeper than the sounds you hear with ears alone.

The gift of seeing my father on that day will stay with me for all my remaining days. It was the first time I consciously saw him as a human being, the way his patients, residents, and colleagues had seen him for many years. There I was in my mid-to-late thirties, finally able to get outside my narrow self-identity--my own trappings, really--as a particular son of a particular father. So this is a paean to my father. And I use the word "paean" quite intentionally. "Paian" is the Homeric name for the physician of the gods.

In case you're wondering, why the orthogonal leap to this paean for my father by way of a reference to a radio story, here's where it comes full circle: Just as Lu Olkowski's piece on Dimitri is spiritual without trying to be, my dad may well be one of the most truly spiritual human beings I've ever met, precisely because he's endeavored so fiercely all his life to be anything but.