Author Archives: miranda

I Am Easily Charmed

Posted on by
6

There has been some confusion around the office due to the fact that my partner became suddenly ill, and it was important that the patients on treatment be seen once a week.  In addition to my own patients, I had seen all of his three weeks ago while he was on vacation, so I had a working knowledge of most of them, their cancers and the problems they were having during treatment.  Still, there were new patients to be seen, simulated and treated and it seemed that the most logical division of labor was for me to see the new patients, and the substitute doctor to see the old patients, many of whom were close to the end of their treatments.  It seemed that way anyway.

So when my partner’s nurse asked me to see a prostate cancer patient belonging to my partner this morning, I asked, “Didn’t Dr. Substitute see him yesterday, as she was supposed to?”  Our nurse answered, “She tried, but he wanted to see you.  He remembered you from three weeks ago. He is at the end of treatment.”  I said, “Okay, just this one time, but I will NOT see him in follow up.  He can return to his urologist for follow up as long as his PSA normalizes.”  A moment later, I was in with the patient, a kindly elderly man who described not his side effects and symptoms, but the fact that yesterday he went to the San Diego Fair with his two daughters, and what a delight it was that he got to spend time with his adult daughters alone without his wife.  Apparently this is a yearly ritual. We spoke about the art exhibits, the rose growing competition, and of course, the fried food.  I thought to myself, “Maybe Dad would like to go to the Fair.” I exited the room twenty minutes later, proclaiming to the nurse, “Okay, I will see him ONE time in follow up.  Just ONE TIME!”  She smiled.

At the end of the day there was another.  Just started on treatment, this prostate cancer patient had missed his on treatment visit yesterday because Dr. Substitute had to leave.  The nurse warned, “He’s a bit chatty.”  I entered the room, whereupon he declared, “No cancer patient is truly cured.  I just hope I outlive my cancer.”  This was a challenge indeed.  Despite the fact that I was quite certain my partner had already had this conversation with the patient, I felt the urge—no, the COMPULSION—to tell this patient of the multitude who indeed I had cured over a thirty year career.  It was a long conversation.  We both enjoyed it, heartily.  I added another patient to my roster.

What is it with these prostate cancer patients?  We have a mutual admiration society.  And I hear that the word on the golf course is, I give the best “finger wave” in the business.  Just sayin’…..

I Had a Brother

Posted on by
14

Sometimes it’s the little things that trigger the memories.  A few weeks ago, when those young women who had been abducted in Cleveland were found, almost by accident, my father said to me, “I don’t believe this story.  It’s impossible that these women could be locked up for all those years and no one ever heard them, or saw them.”  I lashed out in anger, “Dad, there are BAD people in this world, whether you want to believe it or not!”  I went on, “Don’t you remember when Joel and I were little and you and Mom would be getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, and you sent us across the grocery store parking lot to the drugstore soda fountain to get dinner?”  My father was a plastic surgery resident then, and we lived, the five of us, in a two bedroom apartment in a complex next door to the A & P.  I was seven and Joel was five and I had a job–no, a DUTY to make sure that the server did not put mayonnaise on his hamburger.  He wanted it PLAIN and that was that.  I said, “Something TERRIBLE could have happened to us and you and Mom didn’t care.  You just wanted us out of the way so you could get ready.”  My father had no recollection of this whatsoever, and it occurred to me that perhaps he wasn’t even there.  Perhaps he was still at work, sewing up lacerations and dog bites and victims of car accidents.  There were no actual memories of him, only of my mother, sitting in front of her vanity, applying her make-up.  She was beautiful, my mother. While she put on her make-up, my little brother stole candy from the drugstore.

My brother spent his life between drug rehab facilities and prison, with brief moments of hopeful sobriety in between.  We stopped speaking for a very long time after he cashed in the ticket my parents sent him so that he could be best man at my wedding.  He spent the weekend in Las Vegas gambling.  He didn’t bother to call.  When our grandmother died a few years later, we met in Chicago at her tiny apartment just before her funeral.  When my father asked if there was anything of hers that we wanted, he replied, “I checked the silver.  It’s under the bed.  It’s plate.”  My brother survived car accidents, a bad marriage and the AIDS epidemic.  He was handsome, smart and charming.  You just wanted to believe him when he said that things were better, that he was getting along  fine.  His eyes were cornflower blue, and my favorite picture of him was taken when he was eighteen.  He was sitting on a ferry boat on the way to Anacortes, wearing a blue shirt.  In the picture, the sky is gray, and he looks young, and sad.

In 2003 my brother died of an accidental heroin overdose in a flop house hotel in Portland, Oregon.  Apparently, he had been shooting up with a friend, who was recently released from prison and was on probation.  The story I got was that the friend knew that my brother had overdosed, but fled rather than call 911 and risk going back to prison himself.  It was a few days before they found my brother’s body. I don’t remember much about the funeral, except that it was late fall, and turning bitter cold.  I still miss him.

The other day I was rifling through drawers in my office, trying to find an article I had saved about melanoma.  I had to pull out some old framed family pictures that were taken off my desk top during some construction in the office, and put in the drawer for safe keeping.  I showed the medical student the pictures of my kids and we had chatted about my sister and he asked, “Do you have other siblings?”  I replied, “I had a brother.”

Weights and Measures

Posted on by
10

The sudden illness of a colleague is always a shocking surprise.  As physicians, we are trained from an early age to ignore our own infirmities in the service of others.  Apart from my three C-sections, I have been extremely fortunate in terms of my own health—I can count the number of sick days I’ve taken in the last thirty years on one hand and I am thankful every day for that blessing.  In my day to day world of caring for cancer patients, I know that in an instant, by accident or by sickness, everything can change.  I think that my colleague must have felt the same—that calling, that mission to care for the stricken that leads one to suppress the rising signs of illness in order to keep that black curtain of infirmity a little further to the edge of the window frame of life.

On Monday I learned that the man I have grown to respect for his insight, his dedication to his profession and his kindness would likely not be coming back to work, ever. My entire department was devastated, especially his nurse who has worked so closely with him for the eighteen months he has been with us, and also his patients, each of them with cancer,  who asked me one by one when they saw me for their weekly on treatment visit, “I am so sorry to hear that he is ill.  When is he coming back?”  As the realization of the gravity of his illness slowly came to all of us, since he had not shared the knowledge of his disease with any of us, the weight began to descend.  Our patient load is at its highest, our working hours are extended, there are patients waiting to be seen, planned and treated.  Who will step in to consult on these patients, to plan their radiation treatments, to oversee their side effects and work the extended hours?  Right now, we do not know.

I have always said that unlike my father, I do not want to “die with my boots on.”  I want to retire while I am still healthy enough to do the things that I’ve put off for so many years—to write, to paint, to take photographs, to teach English, to travel, to play with my dogs, and perhaps, just perhaps, get another horse—an older horse, a calm horse (we grow so brittle as we age that we break more easily!) who will carry me down the trails so that I can smell the orange and lemon blossoms on the trees, up close, as they bloom in late December here.  I said this to my husband last night, at the end of a very long week.  He said, “No one ever knows what they will do when faced with a terminal illness.”

This was a very busy week in the clinic, and I had a medical student rotating with me. In the chaos that surrounded us, I had to keep reminding myself, first things first. Yesterday, together we saw a man with a life threatening cancer.  I was running very late, and he was the last new patient of the week.  My student took the reins—he interviewed the patient, examined the patient, explained the treatment and seamlessly introduced me to the patient and his wife, who were quite pleased with the care and attention he had already received. We completed the consultation together, and as I left the room I suddenly felt a deep sense of satisfaction.

When the weight of illness suddenly descends on an individual, my colleague, and consequently, his patients, his co-workers and me, his partner, we can still take comfort in the small measures of success–the satisfaction that we, as a team, are doing things right.  Sometimes it’s the little things, the small gestures and kindnesses that count.  We dust ourselves off, and we go on.

The Wisdom of Youth

Posted on by
2

In the spring of our freshman year at Yale, my roommates and I were shocked to open the Sunday New York Times, so fashionable at brunch in the dining halls, and see an article written by one of our very own classmates in the Times Magazine.  Called “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,”(http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/maynard-mag.html)  the autobiographical essay captured the angst of those of us growing up in the 1960’s, and made the author Joyce Maynard famous.  So famous in fact that she caught the attention of reclusive author J.D. Salinger who began a series of correspondences with her that culminated in her leaving Yale to go and live with him, when she was nineteen and he was fifty three.  Every so often, a kid surprises you.

And so was I surprised a week or so ago when a good friend of mine from medical school sent me his son’s speech delivered as high school valedictorian of his graduating class.  I wasn’t prepared to be impressed.  After all, I had just heard commencement speeches delivered at my daughter’s graduation ranging from her class president glibly and with great flair comparing a medical career to a marriage, to Harold Varmus, the Nobel Laureate and current Director of the National Cancer Institute speaking about the role of the physician in shaping society and public policy.  Isn’t every parent proud of their child who graduates first in his class in high school?  I certainly would have been, had any of mine had that honor.

Since my friend’s son’s speech has not made it into the New York Times, at least, not yet, I asked permission to share it here.  I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did.  Here it is:

“I had some trouble finding something valuable to say. I fished around, and ultimately, I gave up. I decided instead that it might be easier to babble about the sort of stuff I usually babble about, thinking that would be easier. Two people, 500 people…

Something I think about quite frequently is this concept of a zero sum game. It’s a game in which each player has either a positive or negative number of points, and all the players’ points sum to zero. So, for everyone that wins, everyone who succeeds, someone else has to suffer. There are a lot of these games going on today. Locally, nationally, and globally.

It used to be that everyone was playing these games. 1 human survives, 1 pig-beast becomes food. And of course, over time, these became human sacrifices. We were introduced to the most tragic and relentless of these games, war. One player wins, another loses…

But we find that if we look around, we see a different kind of game. We see games with positive sums, even with increasing sums. Not only does everyone benefit, but the benefit increases over time. Of course, I want to talk about technology. I want to talk about Quinine and Smallpox vaccine and Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Remarkably ingenuitive solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

But I would be lying if I told you that art, and literature, and history, and every other form of creative/analytical human endeavor weren’t included too. They are. They produce information, interpretation, and commentary which is crucial to our collective mental health (it’s no coincidence that great social revolutions are invariably coupled with revolutions in these fields).

As it turns out, the actual field is not particularly important. What is important is what this work represents. It is evidence of a collective endeavor to create, to project the imaginations, designs, interpretations, and realities that exist in our minds onto the world around us. We are all inconceivably powerful creatures, although we might not believe it.

The point is this. We can look at a zero sum game and ask why, and inevitably someone is going so sit us down and tell us that that’s just the way it is: the way it has to be. What we don’t realize is that we have the power, the enormous cosmic influence, to say no. We all make the rules. We are not bound into bad games because we can create alternatives, we can refactor, reconfigure, regenerate.

I’m not a good person to take advice from. Those who know me have discovered this… empirically…What I will say to you guys is that you must bear all this in mind. If you find a bad game, make a better one, whatever field you find yourself in.

You don’t have to worry about being successful (capital S), wealthy, famous, and so on. The only thing you have to do is to open your mind to the mutability of your reality, and start hacking. Let love be your guide and your mind, your hand.”

This Old House

Posted on by
7

When I lived in Boston many years ago, there was a show on television called “This Old House.” Each season of the show, the host Bob Vila, handyman, architect, contractor and visionary would select an old house in the Boston vicinity. Many times, these homes were not merely in need of renovation—they were in need of resurrection. Week after week, episode after episode I would stare at the screen transfixed as new masonry replaced crumbling stone walls, and beautiful decorative moldings emerged from coats of old paint, much of it leaded. I marveled at the fact that one did not have to destroy an old house, raze it and tear it to the ground in order to have a new and better house emerge. It was all about preserving the “bones”, the integrity and the beauty while bringing new technology and materials to bear.

 

My husband and I owned two old houses when we lived in the Boston area more than twenty years ago. The second house was a Georgian style colonial, built in the 1920’s from red brick left over from building the “houses” at Harvard. When I first saw the house, it had been untouched since its birth during the Jazz Age. Strings of glass flapper beads hung in the opening between the dining room and the old closet that served as a kitchen. Gilded tin repousse valences topped windows that showed bubbles in the old glass. There was a foot of standing water in the basement. The well, as it turned out, had been dug on the neighbor’s property—folks just didn’t seem to pay all that much attention to property lines back then. I was instantly smitten. Two years, and my entire salary for those two years later, the old place was fine indeed, with a new kitchen, a new family room and a new master suite. Oh, and a new well. We made the final payment to the contractor and a week later, watched as our belongings were loaded onto a van for the move to San Diego. I cried.

 

Last Sunday I begged my daughter’s indulgence as we drove out Route 9 to Route 16 to the rural town of Sherborn, so we could cruise by—not the brilliantly renovated Georgian colonial–but the very first house we bought when we got married in 1980, an 1860’s post and beam Victorian, quite ridden with decay by the time we made our proud purchase. As we passed the old place at 10 Everett Street, I made her mortification complete as I spotted what appeared to be the latest owner in the driveway and hopped out of the car wielding my camera to introduce myself. When we lived there, the house was very small, barely 1500 square feet. Using Google Earth, I had convinced myself that the old homestead had been torn down and a brand new house built.

 

Staring wide eyed at the beautiful home in front of me, I realized that was not the case. The old aluminum siding had been taken down revealing the classic Victorian “fish scales” under the peaked eaves of the roof along with moldings mounted in a zig zag pattern, painted a dark burgundy against the pale khaki of the wood outer walls and the dark green window trim. The carriage house, which had been in a state of near collapse when we owned the place, had been shored up and connected to the main house with a new family room. The old garage apartment was now an art studio. Smiling, the owner invited me in. The front door still had its rippled stained glass, and the hardwood knotty pine floors underfoot still carried the coats of polyurethane my husband applied 33 years ago when he sanded the old paint off in a labor of sweat and love. She said, “We saved everything that was good about this place. We love it here. We will never leave.”

 
She led me through the house to the expansive back yard, the place where our first deerhounds ran to their hearts content and my daughter picked lilacs and forsythia and blueberries in the spring. She said, “I saved the best for last.” Suddenly, I spotted a new structure—a wooden barn painted to match the house. Two horses grazed in the field. Inside the barn was hung a painted sign which read, “It’s never too late to live happily ever after.” We romanticize our past when we should be planning our future. Happily ever after, indeed.

Nina

Posted on by
8

Sometimes you just get lucky. When I was pregnant with my first child, during my radiation oncology residency, we had a guy living in the apartment over our garage, which we liked to refer to as “the carriage house.” He was a dog trainer by trade, and in his spare time he played softball in a local adult league. When we told him he had to move out, because we wanted the apartment for a live in childcare provider, he had a different idea. He wanted us to hire a woman he knew—the mother of one of his softball teammates. He told us about this woman in detail—that she was the mother of six children and that she had also raised her nieces and nephews when their parents were killed in a car crash, and that she was currently doing foster care for the state but had grown tired of that and disillusioned with “the system. “ He pronounced, without a shadow of doubt, “She will be PERFECT for you.”

 

Nina came to interview on a hot summer day, and she never left. At least not until we left HER to move to San Diego almost nine years later. We never checked another reference and we never interviewed another person. There was just something about her that seemed so, well, “motherly. “ That was it. She was uneducated, grew up in a poor family in Newfoundland Canada, and we only learned later that she could barely spell when she began to write down phone messages while we were at work during the day, after my maternity leave was over. It mattered not a whit. My only hesitation in hiring her was that she was fifty-six years old at the time. Since I was only thirty, I thought that was old. I think differently now.

 

About a month into Nina’s tenure with our family, my father called to ask how things were going with our new babysitter. I told him, “She’s fine, but she has one annoying habit. She shows up at work early every day. It cuts into my bonding time with my baby.” Really, I said that. My father, having relied on my mother to raise HIS three children, retorted, “And this is a PROBLEM? Do you realize how LUCKY you are?” That may have been the smartest thing my father ever said to me.

 

A year after we left Boston, Nina suffered a massive heart attack while watching the Boston Marathon. She was rushed to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and had emergency bypass surgery and survived. A few years after that, she was diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer, and underwent chemotherapy and radiation therapy and again, she survived. Last year, she lost Charlie, her beloved husband of more than sixty years, and still, she survived. And two months ago she fell, hit her head and had a subdural hematoma. At eighty-five years old, she is the definition of “survivor.”

 

On our way to Boston, my daughter said, “I think we should go see Nina on Sunday.” The last time she saw Nina was nearly ten years ago, when she was in college. So Sunday we drove out to Framingham, where her old babysitter lives in a senior housing project, attended to by her daughters who live close by. On the way there, we passed the Sunshine Dairy, where Nina used to take her for ice cream as a child. Alex said, “We have to get some for Nina. She loves their maple walnut. “ She was right. We were greeted at the door by Nina, a very diminished and frail Nina wearing a single strand of pearls I bought her for her sixtieth birthday. She smiled at us, and congratulated my daughter on her medical school graduation. I burst into tears. This woman more than anyone else, had made it all possible.

 

Young woman doctors—residents, fellows and medical students—sometimes ask me how to choose a “nanny”, as they are called now. I have no idea. Mine seemed to fall into my lap and stayed forever in my heart. I hope fervently for these young mothers that they get as lucky as I was.

The Red Baton

Posted on by
Reply

 

While I was in Boston last week, I got an email addressed to the School of Medicine faculty group from the president of the first year medical school class. It was an invitation to attend a ceremony which took place three days ago, on the courtyard lawn of the medical school. This ceremony was being held to honor those who had donated their bodies to science, more precisely to the anatomy lab where all first years learn to dissect out the intricacies of the human body. Families of the deceased donors were also invited to this event, an appreciation organized by the medical students. The class president urged as many medical students and faculty to attend as possible. I had never heard of such a ceremony but if I had not been out of town, I would have gone.

 
It was getting late last Wednesday night when we drove through Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When I saw the highway signs, I wondered about the significance of the name. As a little girl growing up in Texas, I had taken baton-twirling lessons, like every other little girl in Texas. Those lessons were short lived—I did not quite have the manual dexterity necessary to play that stick back and forth between my short chubby fingers. In high school I learned a new meaning for baton–that it was the stick passed from runner to runner during a relay race. I made a mental note to look up Baton Rouge when I got to the hotel since I thought perhaps I could use the meaning as a metaphor, having just “passed the baton” to my daughter, the newly minted doctor. Wikipedia disavowed me of that notion. Baton Rouge LA, or “red stick” was named quite literally after a cypress stick that the early French discoverer of the locale, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’ Iberville, had found planted in a riverbed adorned with the bodies and blood of slaughtered animals to mark the boundary between the Bayou Goula and Houma tribal territories. By the early 1800′s the upper tribes of the Creek were known as the “Red Stick Warriors.”

 
It’s been a week or so now, but I’ve been thinking that perhaps that “red stick” analogy wasn’t so far off the mark after all. The bodies of those donors mark the end of the territory of innocence for a medical student. No matter how much black humor is displayed in the lab by nervous students wielding a scalpel for the first time, there is honor and dignity in there too. Along the way, the students see more bodies and more blood, both literally and figuratively as patients live and die by their hands, and new priorities and goals emerge, while old friendships and even marriages fall away. Parents send children away to college, and in these days of prolonged dependence and economic hardship, many times children return. At medical school graduation last Tuesday night, I saw no children wearing caps and gowns. A new generation emerged to wage war on sickness. The baton has indeed been passed.

Trot Trot to Boston

Posted on by
12

“Trot trot to Boston

Trot trot to Lynn

Watch out Baby

So you don’t FALL IN!”

Nursery Rhyme

My road trip expectations always exceed their reality.   Last Wednesday evening, after a frantic day of packing which included a trip to the tailor to pick up her favorite dress being repaired for a ripped hemline, my daughter and I set out in her aged Subaru for Boston, MA where she will begin her residency in Internal Medicine in a few weeks.   The last time I did this particular road trip was 1979, when I myself set out in my bright red Camaro—armed with a six foot five male friend and apartment neighbor whose airfare home was paid by my parents in return for his perceived protection.  My daughter had to settle for a Taser.   Last time we barreled through Montgomery AL, Atlanta GA and Washington DC where the unfortunate Camaro had its side bashed in by a group of inebriated sailors returning from a night on the town.  We drove all day and most of the night, my friend Ed’s CB radio alerting us to lurking highway patrol cars ahead.  I didn’t see much of the countryside but I did learn my fare share of trucker lingo, including a meaning for the word “beaver” that in my naivete, I had never even considered.

 

This time was going to be different.  I polled patients and friends alike regarding the best, most scenic route to take.  One of my patients, a former long distance trucker, voted for a drive through the eastern part of Tennessee and the western half of Virginia, declaring definitively that the truck stops there had both the best restrooms and the best souvenirs.  My dog showing friends, who regularly hit the road with Hyundais full of hounds concurred.  I imagined myself lazily browsing for antiques along the back roads of Knoxville, and scanning the craft shops of Gatlinburg for handmade brooms, the better to sweep up the ever present dog hair collecting behind the furniture at home.  I dispatched my daughter’s cat to the boarding kennel and bought her a cheap ticket to go retrieve him once she had settled in, since several days in a car with the perfume of kitty litter was not my idea of a vacation, no matter how well behaved or adorable the cat.

 

Despite a first evening arrival in New Orleans at nearly 1 am, and spending the night without either the food or beverages the city is known for, my back road dreams were still intact when we reached Knoxville late on day 2.  It was the morning of the third day, when two locals laughed across the aisle at the Cracker Barrel at my mispronunciation of Sevierville (it’s SEVERE-ville, not SEAVER-ville, for the uninitiated) before they revealed that Gatlinburg, and the entrance to the Great Smokey Mountain National Park were at least a 45 minute drive each way from the highway, when it finally dawned on me that one does not drive nearly 2,000 miles in 3 days and sightsee along the way.   No trips down the off ramps to sample the fare at local diners, no sweeping vistas to photograph at 80 miles an hour, no local yellow dogs rolling over to have their white bellies scratched.   It was Boston or bust, and we coasted into Beantown on Saturday night of the holiday weekend, having taken  nearly 5 hours to drive in pouring rain around the city of New York.

 

One of these years, I will climb in my old Suburban “Big Red”, 200,000 miles and counting, and really drive across this great country of ours and I will stop along the way, whenever I want for as long as I want.  I will buy Cajun hot sauce, brooms made of fresh straw and local honey along the way. But for now—mission accomplished—in good time, with good company!  Tomorrow, back to work with my back road daydreams.

Happy Mother’s Day

Posted on by
7

They lied to us, they did–Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and all the others who told us back in the 60’s and 70’s that we could have it all. Or maybe they weren’t exactly lying to the impressionable girls graduating from high school and like me, beginning their college and subsequent careers as professionals in schools and fields once exclusively reserved for men.  Maybe they truly didn’t know the physical and emotional tolls our lofty goals would exact on ourselves, our marriages and our children.  We have come of age now, and we are tired.

To the stay at home moms, who ran the carpools, acted as room mothers, cheered at every Little League game and had a healthy dinner on the table at six pm, I salute you.  I was secretly envious of the time you were able to spend with your children.  You didn’t miss a thing in their lives, and if you were secretly envious of me—my financial independence, my ability to walk out the door in the morning and leave the chaos behind to enter the adult world where you could actually reason with people most of the time—I never knew it.

To my fellow female doctors, lawyers, business women, veterinarians and leaders in industry, I salute you also.  No matter how tired you were at the end of the day, you made time for your children—you rushed out of work to get to the ballet recital, you helped with their homework, you got down on the floor and you played games when your back hurt and your eyelids were closing as you read “Goodnight Moon” one more time.  You were consumed by guilt most of the time—at work when you felt you could not give it your all after a sleepless night, at home when your child called you by your caregiver’s name.

This Mother’s Day is my first without a mother—she passed away in January, having lived her life as the wife of a busy plastic surgeon—the endless nights of caring for three children while he was on call, the arguments over promised wealth as a private practitioner versus the academic life he chose, the pampered later years when she could and did have anything she wanted.  But when I was a sophomore in college, majoring in English, she took me aside and said, “You have to DO something!  Don’t be like me. You must choose a career where you never have to depend on anyone but yourself.”  I listened and went to medical school.  Forty years later, it was the right choice for me.

When I was a junior medical resident at Beth Israel Hospital, Betty Friedan’s daughter Emily was one of my medical students.  In a week, my own daughter graduates from medical school.  As my children grew up, I had only one bit of advice for them that I remember repeating like a mantra:  Whatever you do, wherever you go, at the end of the day, every day, be able to look in the mirror and feel good about yourself.

And don’t think it’s going to be easy.  Motherhood never is.  Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

Posted on by
5

Yesterday I had the unique experience of watching a production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, acted, with musical accompaniment, entirely by a group of fifth graders.  Friends of mine from Los Angeles, himself a teacher at the Hobart Boulevard public elementary school, had invited me to this year’s presentation by the Hobart Shakespeareans.  As many of you know, punctuality has never been one of my virtues, and the 105 mile drive, coupled with the infamous LA traffic, had me sweating before I even took my seat.  But once I had clamored over Kurt’s knees and nearly fallen into Heather’s lap, I settled in for nearly three hours of pure magic, and not just the magic of Propero, the magician of the Tempest.

 

Begun years ago by their remarkable teacher Rafe Esquith, the fifth grade Hobart Shakespeareans of Room 56 are a group of underserved, underfunded children of largely Korean and Mexican first generation parents.  Many do not speak English when they arrive at school, many are on federally funded school lunch programs.  But by the fifth grade, those children lucky enough to be in Room 56 have studied the works of Will to the extent that they produce, in full Elizabethan English tempered with the sounds of rock and roll, reggae and Beethoven, a Shakespearean masterpiece a year.  When the lights went down yesterday, at 11 am, I was transported, and overwhelmed–and instantly moved to tears.

 

As an English major in college, the teaching of the humanities, and English in particular, has always been near and dear to my heart.  I believe that by studying great works of literature, and Shakespeare in particular, one can experience the breadth and scope of human emotion—joy, sorrow, aspiration, suffering, love, longing, mystery and hope—in short, most of the qualities necessary to become a good doctor.  Sadly, college premedical requirements do not include more than a cursory English class or two, mainly to make sure that a student can string together a few words to write a sentence.  The world of science and medicine has become infinitely more complicated in the last several decades—there is so much to learn about biochemistry that taking on “extras” like an advanced literature class, or an art class or a philosophy class becomes a burden, instead of a pleasure.  While many medical schools encourage non-science majors to apply, the truth of the matter is that humanities majors are significantly disadvantaged when it comes to taking the MCATs and showing publications on their resumes.

 

The Hobart Shakespeareans come to school at 7 am, and stay until 5 pm.  They learn math, and science, and history and geography and government but lunchtime is reserved for rock and roll guitar lessons.   They wear T-shirts with the face of William Shakespeare and the caption, Will Power.  Judging from the college banners placed around the perimeter of room 56, and the names below them, ultimately they attend Yale, and Harvard, and UCLA and Stanford, as often if not more than their more privileged peers.  And many of them will become doctors. They live by the motto:  “Be Nice. Work Hard.”

 

We can all take a lesson from that.

 

For more about Rafe Esquith and the Hobart Shakespeareans, go to www.hobartshakespeareans.org