Brief Thoughts
lost and found
{cast away}…
After a meteor shower of pages to the 4 beepers adorning my waist band, a series of perplexing admissions, and random patients causing ridiculously unnecessary stress, I began my lonely journey back to one of the hospital work rooms where most of my scant free-time in the past two weeks had been spent.
Once there, I was looking forward to spending some time with “Wilson”, a computer with whom I had cultivated a close relationship while navigating the seduction of Black Betty.
On this night though, I punched in the key code to the workroom door to find someone sitting at the computer beside Wilson.
I glanced at my iPhone and noted the time to be “2:07AM”.
In the previous two weeks, other than the aforementioned “life vest” I had with me on a few nights, there had been no other signs of life in this work room.
Wilson and I had discussed each phone call I received, him showing me the necessary data to make my decisions and cautiously warning me when a order I was about to enter was contra-indicated.
On this dark night, Wilson was not alone.
Wilson did not seem alarmed by this strangers presence, but I approached cautiously from the far side of the dimly lit room.
Before positioning myself at Wilson’s helm, I jovially offered a polite “Hi there” to the scrub-wearing woman who appeared to be typing in a patient’s electronic chart.
She did not respond.
Her presence was mildly unnerving, though slightly comforting, but I dared not repeat myself, much less attempt to make eye contact with the stranger.
But before my curiosity could win out and tempt me to offer the stranger another greeting , pager #3 let out another bleeping roar.
I quickly punched the number into the phone beside Wilson while I waited for him to wake up from his electronic slumber.
The nurse who queried me over the phone was audibly confused; despite Wilson and I’s best efforts, we could not find her answer.
In an attempt to assuage her fears, I promised to come directly to the floor and work out the issue in person. Wilson would stay behind and keep an eye on the stranger.
I glanced again at the stranger, furiously typing away at the computer beside Wilson, but I did not repeat my greeting, or wish her a fond farewell.
I returned 20 minutes later having solved the mystery posed by a new nurse, but Wilson was alone. There was no sign of the stranger.
My body still ached. My mind was still heavy.
In that moment, I wondered if there ever had been a stranger sitting beside Wilson, furiously entering some record in a patient’s chart.
I sat down again, facing Wilson, wondering if I should ask him where the stranger had gone. Or if there ever had been a stranger.
Perhaps, I had imagined the entire encounter.
Not wanting to let on about my fatigue, I decided against asking Wilson. He had helped me enough these past two weeks.
And I did not feel like burdening him with the knowledge that I may have lost my mind.
As the clock struck 9AM, I slowly dialed my landlord’s number into my phone.
It rang.
And rang.
And rang.
And then voicemail.
Sitting in the call room, I provided another detailed message as to my predicament, as if I was meticulously spelling “HELP” in the sand of a long-forgotten beach.
In the following moments, a wide range of emotions raged through my mind: fear, anger, sorrow, disbelief, heartbreak.
I laid down on the crisply pressed sheets of the hardened mattress, feeling lost beyond my worst nightmare.
But as my head jostled up against the pillow, the aches in my body lifted. The heaviness in my mind evaporated.
My Ego would not go down without a fight; it bullied my body from the call room and plotted a course for my landlord’s office.
Once there, I was met with disbelief.
Neither the office manager or the owner recognized the bearded man informing them of his sequestration in a small call room in the hospital down the street.
They were equally perplexed when I laid out my sojourn from the hospital to their office to relay in person the message I had left numerous times on voicemail.
I dared not mention to them how Wilson and I had survived the past two weeks; I didn’t think they would understand.
They apologized profusely for believing my lost keys had been found and returned to me by the handyman.
I calmly, but firmly, informed my landlord that he would proceed to walk me back to my apartment building; we found the keys locked in my mailbox.
My bearded face wondered aloud to my landlord if the handyman had believed me to possess teleportation properties allowing me to move my electrons and protons from outside the building into the entryway where the mailbox was located.
And if he believed me to possess the skills of Houdini to remove the keys from the mailbox without a key.
My Ego kept my Id from going bezerker on my landlord as he handed my keys to me.
I informed him I was in fact only a physician, not a teleporting magician.
The subsequent night was a maelstrom of terror.
If I had spontaneously combusted it would have been a fitting end to my Residency.
When the night came to an end, I was still cast away. My “life vest” had appeared and like clock work was torn from my being at midnight.
The night continued to be so punishing that I called my Chief Residents and another seasoned colleague summarily washed upon the shore of my deserted island.
He found me, lost amongst the bounding waves of pages and admission, barely keeping my head above water.
His effort to save me was seemingly futile as Black Betty enveloped us both, like a storm beating down on a small dinghy in the Aegean Sea.
But we both survived the raging storm; hoping to find a current that would take us away from this world.
I was rescued 24 hours later.
My final scheduled foray into Night Float had been completed as the sun rose that Friday morning.
I unclasped 3 pagers from my waist, handing them to the physicians who would dare navigate these rough waters.
Begrudgingly, I left behind Wilson, as my rescuers assured me of a job well done surviving this experience.
For him, I hoped the best.
Perhaps he would guide some other Cast Away from the path laid out by Black Betty as they washed upon the shore.
Delta Fox X-Ray
{in the not-too-distant future}
—–
When I was 18 years old, I used to run across campus to the nearest computer lab to check my e-mail and/or log on to ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger to see what my friends were up to.
By the time I was 19 and sophomore in college, I had my own computer, a 1-inch thick laptop, which allowed me to check my e-mail, write my papers, and check AOL IM to see which party my friends were attending on any given night.
—–
—–
Over the course of one year, my proximity to everyone else I knew was minimized to only a few key strokes. Owning a portable computer added a previously unknown efficiency to my life. Yet, it was simply a microcosm for what was occurring all throughout the world by the end of the 20th century.
The explosion of technology allowing humans to be constantly linked to each other was on the horizon.
Nearly 17 years later…
I’m writing these words on my iPad.
—–
—–
I’m writing these words on my laptop.
I’m writing these words on my iPhone.
I’m writing these words from my Google Glasses.
{Ok, the last line was a lie. I will never own Google Glasses}
To say things have changed technologically in the last twenty years is an understatement. Now I’m constantly connected to my friends, work, and the rest of the world by a myriad of technologic devices.
—–
{the array of cellphones I’ve used in the past 6 years}
—–
Only twenty years ago I was 15 and my family had one PC (personal computer). I had grown up during a technological evolution, owning a Commodore 64, later a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and even starting to dabble in electronic mail (e-mail) before I headed off to college in 1998.
Only half of my life later, I am sitting in a Tim Horton’s using their wifi to type this entry on an iPad. And lounging on the patio of a Panera eating up their bandwith. And surfing the web in my apartment using the HotSpot option on my Verizon data plan.
The world has changed beyond our wildest comprehensions in the past twenty years, if only in the way technology has become ubiquitious in our life. The evolution of technologic existence, from personal handheld devices to electronic medical records has harkened an interconnectedness which was fathomable only by the most forward thinking geniuses of the past.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmFEFO72gA
—–
Now if you own a “Smartphone”, which nearly every adult in America does, you may have to be picky in regards to what platform you use to stay conncected, if only because of time needed to maintain your “online presence.”
There’s SnapChat, Whatsapp, Instagram, Magisto, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and the monolith Facebook. You can be on all of them simultaneously. Or individually. Or one of them. Or none of them (though that’s unlikely).
Forget ICQ (uh oh!) and AOL IM. They were dead and buried long ago. All hail the new regime of personal interconnectedness. At this rate, I sincerely don’t see an end in sight for our limits in technologic advances and how we will choose to use them.
—–
—–
If I had to guess, people in 50 years will look back at this time in history and view us in bemusement like I do when re-watching the above scene of life in a post-apocalyptic world; bemused by children adorned in an amalgamation of non-coherent technologies.
But it’s not that I particularly think all these advances, or desires to advance, are necessarily good, or even helpful in the ways we intend. As a physician, I am constantly emboldened to become One with the latest advances in Electronic Medical Record systems. As if the cure to diabetes, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and substance abuse are all only a click away; they most certainly are not.
—–
The rise of technology, particularly the internet, has added a new dimension to our human capabilities, as Asimov so astutely predicted. No longer are we bound by the knowledge we are allowed to know. Today we are allowed to seek out knowledge, the knowledge we desire, not necessarily the knowledge others want for us.
—–
—–
By my estimation, there is absolutely no telling where technology will take us in the next twenty years. But more importantly, do we need to go where technology is taking us? Only time will tell.
Dante’s Inferno
[Gustave Doré, The Heresiarchs (1890)]
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I shall die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.
I am going to Hell. At this point in my life, I’m fairly certain of this fate. Of course, that’s if Hell actually exists.
If it exists, I certainly hope it’s as twisted and tormented as Dante makes it out to be. Because then I’d have some eternal entertainment to go along with my eternal damnation.
For most of my life I thought it was an absolute certainty I’d be going to Heaven. It was a belief grounded in my relatively intact set of morals, which I picked up from a childhood of Christian indoctrination. As in, “thou shalt not kill.”
Even on my worst days, I have definitely never killed anyone. Obviously, this is a solid step in the direction of Heaven for most people. And I took many other steps in that direction for a significant portion of my life. As a child, I even thought it would be cool to be a priest.
I was raised in a Catholic household, went to church every Sunday, believed in God, said my prayers, went to confession, and received communion. Then I went to college, started sleeping in on Sundays, and only made it to church when I was home on vacation. Yet, I still believed in God, that my relatively moral lifestyle was the foundation for a good life, and enjoyed asking God for things of a miraculous nature.
For example, one of my favorite requests went something like, “Dear God, this workout is killing me. Don’t let me die on the elliptical machine.”
Once I started grad school, I started making a real attempt to go to church more regularly, as way of accepting a mature lifestyle, and establishing myself in the community.
When I moved to Boston, I started going to church more regularly, bolstered by the belief that I had found my purpose in life… But that was back in 2004 and the Catholic Church was just beginning to endure the greatest assault it has ever faced. The assault was coming from every angle, even from within. As the accusations of sexual abuse started multiplying and became reality, I was in the midst of the greatest transformation of my life.
I began to have faith in myself.
The same level of faith it takes to believe there is a higher power, someone or something who has pre-destined each of our lives, was the amount of faith I had swept over me and my ability to transform my own life. This level of faith made me begin to question a lot of the certainties I had in my life, not only about religion, but about who I wanted to become, how I could do it, and what it would take.
A lot of things have happened between then and now in my life. Some good. Some bad. But for the most part, the past decade has been a whirlwind of self-discovery. However, my willingness to question what I have believed about religion, God, and faith definitely sits atop my list.
—–
Not that long ago, before I started my medical residency, I was working overnight at the Amazon warehouse in Lexington, KY. Early one morning, around 2AM, a 21-year-old young man was across the conveyor belt from me when he struck up a conversation. I had seen him around before and noticed that during our brief 15 minute breaks he would be reading the Bible. On this night, our chit-chat quickly moved to the most engrossing discussion on religion I have ever experienced.
It didn’t take long for me to recognize this guy had thoroughly delved into the Bible and his knowledge of scripture was as impressive as any Sunday morning sermon I’ve ever heard. But his story, the one that led him to give himself to God, was the final piece of the puzzle in my religious self-discovery.
He told me how he had grown up in a misogynistic home, one where he was taught to do as he wished and pleased, to use sex and drugs to make himself feel good, and to ignore the role of education and morals in his life. He was infinitely atheist, often openly mocking acquaintances and classmates, even friends, who entertained the idea of a higher power.
But at age 19, with his two-year old son, born of a drug-laden sexual tryst, at his side, he gave himself to God.
His girlfriend was pregnant with his next child and he was beginning to feel overwhelmed with the future. He described looking at his son one night, becoming overcome with grief, falling to his knees, and beginning to cry profusely. Then, he felt the hand of God on his shoulder, could hear Him speaking in his ear, and a wave of emotion poured over him.
Moments later, he was irreparably changed. He felt a purpose in his life and a desire to live with a moral certitude. He felt “saved”, as if there was someone else looking out for him and asking him to be a better person. The thought of his eternal salvation came to mind. So he dedicated his free time to his family and his religious education.
From the way he described himself prior to this experience, I could tell a completely different man was standing across from me on an early morning in late May. The difference between him and I, though, was that he believed God had changed his life, while I understood that he, and he alone, had made a decision; the decision to no longer be an irresponsible child, trying to raise a child of his own, and to instead become a grown adult.
In my mind, there is no spiritual mystery to maturation.
—-
The understanding of the human body I have acquired during my medical education is an easy scapegoat for my drift away from God and/or religion. But truth be told, my beliefs were changing long before I understood the electrical underpinnings involved in a heartbeat, the diffusion capacity of a pneumocyte in the lung, or the capability of an egg to be fertilized by sperm.
My medical knowledge has played a role, but not as great as it might seem. I have actually entertained the reality that my belief in science, the platform on which medicine is based, is not mutually exclusive from religion. Many people think a true belief in science, or more accurately, the scientific method, prevents one from acknowledging a God. I don’t necessarily believe that is the case.
“Finding Darwin’s God” by Kenneth R. Miller, is one of the most influential and thought-provoking texts I’ve read in the past 10 years. In it, he lays a quite convincing thesis for the co-existence of God and Science. In fact, he argues the “miracle of life” known as creation is not mutually exclusive from the acknowledgement of evolution. He argues it may actually speak to the wonderful power of a creator; one that has set the world in motion, but is allowing it to be self-defined.
Self-defined. Like each and every one of us.
—-
As I laid out my thesis against his belief in God, the young man at Amazon pointed out he had at one time felt exactly the same way. Until the fateful day in his life when he was saved. When God revealed Himself and changed the young man’s understanding of the world and his life.
When the young man expressed it as his destiny, one that had been pre-determined, I pointed out if his God is real and controlling my life, then my life is pre-destined, and I truly have no say in whether I end up in Heaven. Or Hell.
And if that is the case, then I am on a Highway to Hell. Because the God of Christianity requires a belief in Him to be saved. There are no keys to the kingdom of Heaven to those of us who have chosen to place our faith in the belief we have control of our lives; control of who we become and our ability to make it happen through sheer willpower and effort.
Faith is not exclusive to those who have religion in their lives. Some of us have faith there is nothing waiting for us after our hearts stop beating. And that faith allows you to embrace the world, its challenges, its heartbreak, and its rewards more than the holiest of thou.
Of course, I could be wrong. And then I’ll end up in Hell. But rest assured, Dante and I will have a quite a party down there. At the very least, I’ll spend the rest of eternity trying to convince Lucifer to apologize to the Man Upstairs.
Elbrecht's Corpuscle 