distraction

 

 

One of my former students is returning to my institution for a medical fellowship in pain management. Such trainees are called "pain fellows." Upon learning of this exciting career development, I sent the following note and memory...

"I may have shared with you during your years in my lab that it was a pain fellow who made a big impact on my life during my first year at Mayo in 1995-1996. As you will recall, though I was asymptomatic, my Mayo employment physical revealed the recurrence of retroperitoneal paraganglioma and bone metastases in my skull and pelvis. We were terrified, of course. After skull radiation in the fall on 1995, I had a complex open abdominal operation in the early spring of 1996. I ended up in the hospital for more than three weeks due to adhesions and the need for a second operation. I lost a ton of weight. It was a frustrating and discouraging and scary experience.

The bright spot was a pain fellow who got to know me at Methodist Hospital during those long weeks. I wish I remembered his name. As I was not recovering after the first surgery and feeling very sorry for myself, he asked me about my career and why I felt so frustrated and hopeless. I pointed out the window of my hospital room toward the Guggenheim Building a few blocks away and said that my lab was there, and my students, and my science career, and I missed them. He asked me why I wasn’t still working. I looked at him blankly, me with my IV pole and catheter and NG tube and huge surgical incision.
 
He told me to get back to work.
 
What he meant was that I should start spending time again with my students and thinking about my projects and stop sitting in a puddle of self-pity focused on my pain and fear. Of course, what he really was prescribing was distraction. I had learned about the power of distraction back in Lamaze class, but had not really understood. The pain fellow told me to get out of my hospital room and meet with my PhD students (Nicole had just joined my lab at the time) in the Lips Atrium, in my wheelchair, with a robe, IV pole, NG tube, urine bag, and as much stamina as I could muster, and talk about their experiments and next steps.

So I started doing it each day. Laura or a nurse would help or I would stagger down on my own, and the students would come over at assigned times and we would meet in the atrium. I’m sure I looked absolutely tragic. My students were very good sports about it. The experience was so therapeutic because it distracted me from my self-pity and reminded me of my career and my love for my students.

No pain meds.
No prescriptions.
A kick in the butt to remind me that being in the hospital should not define me as a patient.
 
That was 25 years ago. This coming Sunday is the two-year anniversary of a 7-hour open abdominal surgery for resection of a section of small bowel due to obstruction following multiple episodes of radiation and the prior surgeries. The 12 hospital nights were no picnic, but I found myself remembering that counsel of a pain fellow 23 years earlier, who taught me not to define myself as a patient, but as a man of faith, husband, father, and molecular biologist who just happened to be in the hospital. I even arranged for my whole lab group to come over to a conference room at St Marys for a group meeting while I was there. Fortunately I had my NG tube removed earlier that morning (and I had a shower).

So pain fellows can change lives, even without drugs.
 
You’ll be a great one."


10.15.20