My father
was a doctor, well-respected in our community, a brilliant
diagnostician with a practice of over a thousand patients. He held
degrees in
medicine,
surgery, and dentistry, later settling into his first
love:
familymedicine.
The quintessential
family
doctor you called at home at 3:00am if your child was sick, he not only
took the call, he was as likely to get out of bed and come over with
his black bag to pay your child a visit. He also saw patients in his
consulting rooms and made housecalls during the day. Weekends were the
same. If we ever got sick, either he or his colleagues took care of us.
Care was immediate, excellent, and complimentary (a matter of
professional courtesy). It ruined my expectations of
health care
in the United States. Here's what I mean by that.
These days I get my
health care
from an HMO (Health Maintenance
Organization). It's good (very good) but they don't do house
calls, you can't see them on weekends, and it may take two weeks or
more to get an office visit. I miss the warmth and attention in
health care
to which I became accustomed as a child. In spite of myself, that
translated to a second-guessing ie to a mistrust of the care I did
receive. Any doctor I saw had to prove themselves to me (my essential
listening
for them, was skepticism). It didn't do them any good, and it certainly
didn't do me any good. But that was how I was with doctors then.
I'd been seeing a doctor, keeping an eye on a mild yet nagging
condition I was experiencing. Whatever he suggested, I second-guessed.
He recommended
medication.
I said I would wait-and-see. He suggested I start treatment. I
said I'd consider it. He spoke respectfully, yet with a flat tone in
his
voice.
I could tell I was not his favorite patient. One day (I don't know why
or what swayed me) I stopped
resisting
him, filled his prescription at my local pharmacy, and started taking
the
medication
which he recommended. The results were dramatic. The condition I was
experiencing cleared up in days without side effects.
I called him. I said I was calling to apologize. "For what?" he asked -
in a flat tone. "For distrusting you, not
listening
to you, for my skepticism.". I told him about
my father,
my expectations. I said I would've been better off had I
listened
to him and started the
medication
sooner. At first, he didn't say anything.
When he finally spoke, there was something in his
voice
I'd never heard before. It was palpable. The flat tone was gone. He was
vibrant, relatable, elated, trustworthy, and relieved in a way he'd
never occurred for me before. I am 1,000% clear nothing had changed
from his side. I am just as clear any change I attributed to him came
directly out of my no longer getting in his way of doing what he does
best, of telling him
the truth,
of restoring
intimacy
and
trust,
of accepting and acknowledging his knowledge and acumen, of
being human
with him in an open way that no longer required he prove himself to me
first.
It's not
simply
that I stopped
resisting
him and told him
the truth
about the origins of my impossibly high expectations for him and for
health care,
which
lit him up.
It's in doing so, we became connected as people. He was no longer
compared to
my father.
He no longer had to meet the measures of professional courtesy in order
to be accepted. Even though we had differences in approaching the
issue, he was nonetheless a very studied, well qualified specialist who
was now acknowledged as one by me, maybe for the first time. Amazingly
enough, being connected as people paved the way for a
breakthrough
in
health.