1 Apodaca
“A Loving Diagnosis”
Preface
The first day of class I stared at my syllabus confused on what literature and writing had to do with becoming a good doctor. We were handed a packet of readings that would scare even an English major and one assignment: write a 15-20 short story about medicine, healing, and it’s impact in your own lives. I felt as if I was being handed a mass of clay and then asked to turn it into something that matters.
I stayed optimistic about the assignment. If I could create something that actually had an impact on someone’s life, even if it was just my own, then it would be worth it. I would just have to look into my own life and think about what mattered most to me.
I set out wanting to write a story about my grandmother’s struggle with cancer, her body’s slow breakdown, and my mother’s frantic reach to hold onto her mom who would soon be out of her life forever. After finishing the first draft I realized that I was only writing a story that memorialized my grandmother. There was no conflict, no exploration of change.
I thought about Ofri’s book Singular Intimacies,and remembered how each of the chapters revolved around a conflict, whether it was an unruly patient or her struggle coping with the death of her friend. Gawande’s Complications followed the same pattern, focusing each chapter around a central conflict. Seeing how they were able to use a conflict to create a story instead using a story to create a conflict made me want to do the same.
So I decided to change my topic into something a bit more relevant to my own life and struggle. For many years now my dad has neglected his health. This has caused him to gain weight and to be diagnosed with diabetes. Still, even after his diagnosis, he continues to not take care of himself, and I fear that one day this behavior is going to catch up with him.
Writing about my father made me think about Chekhov. The beautiful thing about his writing is that he does not always need to write about an amazing topic that is exciting and compelling. He can write about everyday life, the way that it is lived day in and day out, unchanging, and within that he can create an amazing story. A story that makes one see life like never before.
When I wrote my first draft, all that I thought my story was going to be about was my father’s change from a young college student, full of energy and optimism, into the diabetic man that I see sitting, constantly watching T.V., when I go home. After finishing there was still something missing. No one in my story wanted anything.
A story starts out with a characters desire for something, anything. I know what I want, my father to get off of his ass and start living his life. I want my dad to start giving my mom the life that she deserves. I want my father to still be around for years to see me grow old. With that desire for my father’s change the conflict arises, my dad’s unwillingness to do so.
This is where my story started to take shape and become much more then what it originally started as. I began to open up and share my own outlook on my father’s decline. I expanded on the plot, adding more obstacles that I am trying to overcome to get my dad to change his ways. My dad’s unwillingness to change, my mother’s attitude of being non-confrontational, and my own relationship with my dad that makes me afraid to hurt him, even if it will ultimately heal.
My persona even expanded from not only being a son, but to being a future physician, a healer. This story is about my struggle to heal my father, just as physicians struggle with their own patients. It is also about my role as a son preventing me from risking that relationship for the sake of my dad’s health. Both play a key role throughout this story and throughout my life.
Now it was just a matter of putting it all together into the final product. I met with my peers and professors to get feedback that would help my essay become the finished product I wanted it to become. One of the most helpful pieces of advice I was given was, “Just write, and get it down on paper. Later you can revise and make it better. First, just write.” So I would write, and with everything that I wrote it would be questioned, “What does this have to do with health and healing?” So I would keep my essay focused and not get off track. Eventually, with writing and trimming, it would become the finished product that I have today.
My essay became not only a story about medicine and healing, it became the actual medication, the vehicle for healing to occur. This is the biggest risk that I took with the assignment. Not because it could compromise my grade in any way, but because it could compromise my very relationship with my father and the way that he sees himself. The Hippocratic oath says do no harm. Now as I make my first attempt to heal my first patient, I realize, as I am sure many physicians have, this is not so easy to do.
So when my readers put down this essay what will they walk away with? For one, I hope they see how life can change so much without even realizing it, just as it did for my father, and it takes the help of others to get back on track. Second, that you only get one life and it’s your job to live it to the best of your abilities, and that doing so or failing to do so affects those closest to you. Finally, I hope they see that the everyone has the power to heal, and you can either sit back and watch the train wreck or sift through the wreckage and search for survivors.
Finishing my essay and the course came with the answer to my question I that I asked nearly five months ago. So what does literature and writing have to do with becoming a good doctor? More then I ever knew.
“A Loving Diagnosis”
When I was eighteen years old, I made it my personal mission to change my dad. That’s because it’s hard to take a step back and view your life from a distance, in its entirety. From where you were to where you now stand. This gets even harder with age, as you slip into the unchanging monotone of daily routine. Like the movement of the Earth’s crust over a sea of molten rock, our lives can change subtlety, almost unnoticeably, until one day we open our eyes and see a towering, jagged mountain in the place of a once flat and fertile plain. Sometimes it takes an onlooker to open those eyes and show the way over that mountain, back to the plain that was once all that was on the horizon.
My dad was always very active growing up. He played football and baseball during his younger years. He continued to play sports in high school and became a talented athlete. I saw a picture of him while he was in high school that appeared in the town newspaper. As student body president, he had helped raise money for the weight room at Los Lunas High School, the same school my brothers and I graduated from. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and he was quite athletic, similar to the way that my brothers and I looked while in high school.
After graduating, my dad packed up his things and moved twenty miles north to Albuquerque, where he would continue his education. During his years in undergrad and graduate school, he continued to be physically active. When he wasn’t at school or working at either one of his two jobs, he would be at the Johnson Center, where he would work out in the gym or play racquetball with his classmates.
He met my mom in his first year of law school at a Valentine’s Day party. She must have found something she liked about him, because they were married the following February in her hometown of Santa Rosa, one hundred and twenty miles east of Albuquerque. My parents’ wedding picture hangs in the entryway of my home. I laugh when I see it because colored suits were in style in the seventies, and my dad and his groomsmen are all wearing baby blue. I see many things in my father when I see that picture: his athletic frame, his big smile, and the optimism that he must have contained being a twenty three year old law student with his whole life ahead of him. In many ways, I am looking at myself.
My mom and dad had my brother, Armando, three years after they had married, shortly after my dad had graduated from law school. A year and a half later, they would move to Washington D.C. where my father would take a position as former Congressman Bill Richardson’s 1st Legislative Director. My mom talks of those years as some of the best in her life. My dad would work while my mom would take care of my brother. She and my brother would travel around D.C. seeing all of the memorials, monuments, and museums. She would also spend time with her friends, who were the wives of others working on Capitol Hill. Once a week, her and my dad would pack a lunch, put Armando in the stroller, and the three would head to the park nearby their Arlington Virginia house, where they would lie out a blanket and have a picnic. She was living the life that she saw with my father when she married him.
After the end of Congressman Richardson’s term, my mom and dad returned to Los Lunas where my dad would continue his career as an attorney. Though he was busy with his job he still remained active. He played on an upper division men’s slow pitch softball team. Mens’ softball can get pretty competitive, and my dad’s team, “The Old-timers”, was tough. They would travel around the state competing in various tournaments. I would watch from my stroller parked along the side of the fence. My two brothers, who were older then me, would be running around with their oversized baseball gloves, sprinting to retrieve any home runs or foul balls.
One fall day in 1991, my family and I were in the Manzano Mountains to pick some piñon on my dad’s friend’s ranch. I was only three years old, so I was close by my mother’s side, while my brothers and dad were searching the hillside, filling the bags they were carrying with any little dark seeds in the trees that they came across. My dad noticed some piñon near the trunk of a tree, so he quickly bent over a reached in to gather up his find. “Pop.” I don’t know if that was the sound that anyone could have heard, but that is exactly what his back did. He ruptured a disk in his lower vertebrate.
In his youth, my dad had bounced back from a severe back injury like a sick child on a snow day, but not this time. He never fully recovered to the way that he was prior to the slipped disk. He continued to play softball for a couple years but had to quit, as it got too demanding. He couldn’t even lift heavy things without having to worry about what it would do to his back.
People can experience even major back injuries and still maintain an active lifestyle, yet my dad began to get increasingly less active. He didn’t do as much with my brothers and me anymore. I was very young when he hurt his back, so I have few memories of him coming out and getting dirty with us in the backyard playing two-hand touch. I don’t blame him for it. It’s not his fault that he had hurt his back, and he also had his job as an attorney that was very demanding.
Now he spends his time at his law office, which is just a quarter mile up the road from my house, with his friends, or at home. His time at home consists of his now round body in his chair with his elbows on the kitchen table and remote in hand flipping through the channels. This still continues to be his daily routine and has not changed much since I was in middle school, seven years ago. On Sundays, he mows the backyard lawn on his riding lawnmower making circular passes around our quarter acre until the grass is uniform throughout. Then he comes inside and returns to his seat and watches football for the remainder of the day.
My mom has just gotten used to him. After almost thirty years of marriage I can see how this could be easy to do. I ask her why she doesn’t get him to go places, maybe spend their weekends traveling around, at least get out of the house. She just says, “You know your father, he likes to stick to his routine.” She says this with a sad look in her brown eyes and a small trace of a frown on her lips, remembering what she once saw in my dad when her hand was passed from her own father’s and into his. My mom has always avoided confrontation and has never been one to try to change anyone. But, I can see that my dad’s lack of interest in living his life to the fullest is starting to get to her. She sometimes makes comments such as, “We should go for a car ride to the mountains,” or sometimes she says, “We should start going for walks, get back into shape.” My dad usually acknowledges it with a “Yeah, that could be fun,” and a smile, but with little interest in actually acting on it.
“He’s not always been like this,” she would tell me, “I used to think he would become a senator or lieutenant governor. Some position of power. He was very well connected and was a real people person. I guess he just got tired of it all and lost interest.”
Looking at my dad now, I can’t picture him being a senator or lieutenant governor, but I do remember when my dad had been enthusiastic about working, traveling, and living in general. I know for a fact my dad used to love to take vacations. During my childhood, we would go somewhere every summer for a family trip. I went to Hawaii with my family when I was four, and a different place every summer until my last family vacation, which was when I was twelve. We went to Disney World. We would also go hunting, camping, and fishing throughout the year. As my brother, Armando, who is seven years older then me, graduated high school, we began to do these types of things less and less and as my older brother, Gabe, and my time went to sports we stopped doing these things completely. Now I only have scattered memories of those times.
My mom, brothers, and I still have yet to determine just what happened in my dad’s life that caused him to lose interest. Was it because of that day picking piñon in the mountains when he suffered the back injury, or was due to his oldest son leaving the house and the feelings that came with moving to another stage in his life? Maybe it was the passing of his father to cancer when I was in the eighth grade. Or maybe it was just the realization that he was getting older, times were changing, and there was no way that he could return to those days when he had his whole life ahead of him. Regardless of the catalyst, something did change my dad and it was to become a snowball rolling down a hill, getting increasingly larger and only more difficult to stop.
As Gabe entered his teen years and Armando was graduating, a constant power struggle began between my dad and them. Fueled by teenage bitterness towards authority and the desire for freedom, their relationships with my dad suffered. They used my dad’s static behavior as justification for not giving him the respect he deserved, which only added to my father’s lack of interest in returning to the optimistic life that he had when my brothers and I were children, and he was all that we looked up to. I am only two years younger than Gabe, yet by the time I entered the age where I would rebel, my Dad had already been defeated by the two before me.
My two years as the only child left under the roof of my parents allowed me to build a relationship with my dad unlike that of my brothers. I would take a seat next to him at the kitchen table, and we would have long conversations about school, sports, and politics.
“That Coach Campos of yours has no idea what he’s doing,” he would say from across the table, his bushy eyebrows perched forward matching his untidily combed charcoal hair. “He’s letting so much talent go to waste.”
“I think he’s doing a good job,” I would rebut. “He’s trying to get the ball to our most talented players, our receivers.”
“Well, he’s not getting the ball to you.” Spit flies from his lip and his hand turns into a fist on the table.
“Dad, I’m really not that great,” I would laugh. “I’m five foot six, not the fastest guy on the field, and plus there are a lot better guys out there than me.”
“But you’re smart, you know how to make things happen.”
“Well I’ll just keep my smarts in the classroom if that’s okay with you.”