Category Archives: What I Did

A couple of weeks ago I was participating in a conference with a client discussing a home-based physical therapy technology and whether or not it would be adequately reimbursed by Medicare. Very typical teleconference, and very typical that I had never met the client face to face, but only knew him by his mellifluous Indian accent, which really did the English language proud. I had no idea where my client was located, he could have been calling from India from all that I knew, and I had no idea how old he was or any other particulars. At the end of the call, he suddenly said to my colleague, “Is Elizabeth black?” Continue reading →

I have always wondered what goes on in a locker room before the big game.  Growing up in the pre Title 9 world of women’s sports, there was simply no such thing as a big game.  The only thing going on in our pregame locker room was putting on the uniform, if one even existed.  There was no coach helpfully pointing out that “the only thing between champ and chump is U.”  The implicit concept was that pride and self motivation and basic concepts of team work should more than suffice.  Basically there should be no reason to tap into some collective primal competitive juices.  Besides, it was unladylike.   The closest thing to a team experience that I currently have is my church bell choir where everyone has to be totally on their game to avoid a dystonal disaster, like last week when my bells were in the wrong hand.  Would a pre performance pep talk have sharpened my focus?   The thought of all of us in our royal blue robes shoulder to shoulder, jumping up and down in unison with the choir direction in the middle exhorting us to hit those 8th and 16th notes is ludicrous.  Continue reading →

During my 30+ years of working life, I have migrated from working into the office to home to the office and back again, each time in search of the perfect combination of work environment and family demands.  When Ned was an infant I made my first attempt to “work from home” and found it to be a frustrating oxymoron.  I was trying to establish myself as a free lance medical writer, and one little pesky detail was that my interviewees would call at unexpected times when Ned was not napping as planned.  One elusive physician happened to call when I was in the midst of a particularly grimy diaper change, so I just had to just forge ahead.  With my left hand I balanced Ned on the changing table and prayed that he would cooperate.  I then put the phone under my ear, and with no piece of paper in sight, I had no choice but to take notes for the whole interview by writing on the wall, madly flicking the pen to overcome the effects of gravity.  In one house, my office was in the dressing room next to the bathroom.  One day, as I got out of shower, the office phone rang. I instinctively answered and found myself plunged into a detailed conversation about heart defibrillators.  Little did my caller know that he was having a very cerebral and professional discussion with someone who was stark naked and dripping wet.  Time to go back an office environment!  When I lucked into a top notch baby-sitter/caretaker/household manager, I knew we were all in good hands and I scurried back downtown to work. Continue reading →

On December 18th, with great sadness and some relief, I was officially booted out of the sandwich generation. My mother had died a year and half earlier, but her death did not change my every day life that much. She had really been in her own world for the previous three years or so, so my energies had really focused on my father. And now with his death, the great unraveling was complete, and I was in a new phase of life – before I sandwich up my children. Perhaps I am part of the open-face sandwich generation.

It was strange to be back in the same church again, with the same cast and crew, but this time everything seemed more final, and we were honoring an entire generation that was slipping away. We had learned a few things from the first go-around, and had elected to do a direct cremation and bypass the unnecessary totus porkus funeral home. I went to pick up the ashes and found the modest facility in the strip mall by the bowling alley. The woman was odd looking and pear shaped, wearing a lumpy sweat shirt and large oversized glasses. Before she handed me the two tin containers, she gave me an American flag and in a solemn voice read from a sheet thanking my father for his service to his country. I asked her who was giving me a flag and she said, “the President of the United States and a grateful nation.” It would be easy to snicker at this hokey ceremony in a poorly lit room with a bad shag carpet, but I was unexpectedly moved by this minor gesture – it seemed like something that the US government actually got right.

The last several months have been devoted to unraveling my parents’ possessions and clearing out the house that they had lived in for over 50 years. When realtors first came in to assess the house’s potential, they all sighed and commented that this was going to be a huge job – certainly we would get bogged down by reading old letters, perhaps discovering some deep dark secrets, or divvying up their possessions. However, as we delved into the project, I realized that it would be easy. My parents were simply not collectors and left no trace of their secrets. There were few possessions of any great value, which were easily shared among my siblings. I had secretly hoped that one of my siblings would put their sticker on my childhood portrait, but it was unclaimed at the end of our great divide, so I took it home with me. I wandered around the house trying to find a suitable spot for me, but felt self conscious putting it anywhere prominent. I walked by the powder room and thought, “Perfect.” So there I hang, cute as a bug’s ear in my blue smocked dress providing a cheerful greeting whenever nature calls.

The most sentimental things my mother collected were expressions about the importance of smiling and laughter. Some of these aphorisms were found on the inside of the Dove candies, and I found some crumpled up candy wrappers taped to the inside of a cupboard. On another wall, she had taped all sorts of newspaper clippings that included her name Fanny and my father’s name Ralph. My mother liked to poke fun at her old-fashioned name. In recognition of her double-entendre name she chose “Bum” as her grandmother name. Socially, she went by the name Fan, and would often introduce herself as, “I’m Fan, like an athletic supporter.” My father Ralph, on the other hand, did not seem to appreciate the fact that his name had evolved to an idiom for vomiting. For one anniversary party, I concocted a family game of Jeopardy of various family trivia. I had squares for daily doubles where the group was challenged to come up with the most unique idioms for Fanny and Ralph. Fanny was no problem – rear end, butt, ass, heinie, cheeks, glutes, buns etc. But my father seemed dumbfounded as we spewed forth Ralphisms such as “hug the porcelain throne” (from my college years), “york the pork” and “splash the hash” (from my mother’s college years), and “release the hostages” (from the Iran hostage crisis). After this experience my mother started collecting advertisements and sayings that included the word “Ralph.” No longer was Ralph associated with great intellects like Ralph Waldo Emerson, in fact the general tenor of these ads was that Ralph was a doofus name.

But my father held his head high and went about his own collecting – models of antique cars. When we were younger, he actually owned a few antique cars, which, based on family movies, seemed to be the perfect vehicle to pull toboggans around our circular driveway. My father never thought to treat himself to anything, with the exception of antique car models and magazines. They overflowed shelves in his bedroom, family room and office, there were probably several hundred of them. While his cognitive abilities faded towards the end of his life, he was absolutely spot on when it came to his cars. I could pull any car off the shelf and ask him, “What kind of car is this Dad?” He would hold it in his trembly hand and in an equally trembly voice pronounce, “1937 Model T Ford.” I would turn over the car, and he would be absolutely correct, even though he might be a bit vague on my name.

So this was the biggest challenge – what to do with all the cars. Each of us took 10 cars for a starter, which barely seemed to make a dent in the collection. Then we took 5 more, and more, and then a nephew arrived and gratefully took the rest to display in his garden shop in California. I had just scooped up a bunch of cars, and only later when I got them home, I realized that I had acquired an anatomically correct Good Humor ice cream truck, including tiny latches on the freezer compartments, and the little bells on the windshield.

Of all the cars, this was probably the only one that I had any direct connection to. Don Dumont was the name of the local Good Humor man. I don’t know what he did all winter, but every summer he would reappear wearing a cap that said he was running for president in addition to selling Good Humors. In our household, Good Humor bars were the height of indulgence and only rarely would we get such a treat. I was well aware that I had a very privileged life, but I lived in a community where you could always find someone who had a little bit more – like a Good Humor man who made housecalls. Standing outside, I would hear the tinkle of the ice cream truck and the crunch of gravel as Don Dumont arrived at our next door neighbor’s house and I watched Mrs. Reed take boxes and boxes into her basement. Of course the Reeds were unfailingly generous, and I could have waltzed right over there to get a Good Humor anytime, but the irony was they always got the inferior flavors of toasted almond and strawberry shortcake and not the chocolate fudge cake that I preferred. Out of all the cars that my father could have purchased, why he had chosen to get a Good Humor truck. It wasn’t really even an antique. It did seem odd unless of course we secretly appreciated the same symbolism…

Then of course there were the pictures. Some were of grandparents and great grandparents stored in boxes, where they had been since my parents had gone through the same rite of passage with my grandparents. I pondered on what to do with these. I had no direct connection with many of these ancestors but felt a little guilty about just throwing them out. Around the same time I happened to stay in a bed and breakfast where the owner had spared no detail in recreating a Victorian ambience. As I was sitting eating breakfast, I asked who were the portraits were of – one a man with a stiff collar and a large bushy moustache, and the other a woman with an impossibly cinched waist and a huge theatrical hair do with combs and a bun. They looked similar to the portraits currently lined up in my front hall. The owner said, “Oh I have no idea, I just picked them up at an antique fair.” It suddenly seemed too cruel to consign my ancestors to either the dustbin or to an anonymous contrived tchotchke. At the same time, I saw an ad on TV about a website called ancestor.com which claimed it could help people reclaim their roots. The ads featured people delighting in finding the slightest evidence of their forebearers. And here I was with a huge collection at my finger tips. So the tradition will continue, with pictures gathering dust in the basement, waiting for the next generation to lower the axe.

The next step in the unraveling was the dissolution of various insurance policies, pensions and subscriptions. I discovered that my father was an incredible optimist. He had renewed his subscription to Forbes magazine through 2013. It turned out to be very difficult to get his pension checks turned off, to get refunds for various insurance policies paid in full and straighten out credit cards. Out of frustration I discovered that a small change in verb tense was very impactful. I could say “my father died,” and nothing would get done. However, if I said, “My father is dead,” things started to pop and the weary customer service people on the other end of the line showed signs of life. I got a credit card renewal fee refunded by repetitively saying, “The card holder is dead.” I had subbed out one of my tasks to Nick, and passed on my trick and he was amazed at the responsiveness of the normally obstinate Comcast.

The house is empty now, scrubbed clean, and people comment how heartbreaking it must be to see it deserted. Yes, the tangible vestiges of my magical childhood are dimming, but also no reminders of my parents’ declining days – a daily pitched battle of dignity versus the inevitable, which they mostly won, but even so…  Now I just stop by when I remember to water the few remaining plants that brighten up the place for the scarce prospective buyers. But seeing the house totally empty makes it easier to feel optimistic about a restart – a young family taking over with another joyful 50 year run stretching out ahead of them.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like spot, stop, post) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the words will rhyme with the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

One of the consistent traits of the human —-

Is the desire to mark territory and declare your space.

An —- becomes a back yard with a fence that’s picket white

A house becomes a home with porch lights that greet the night

The space is now an empty shell and people ask “Does it break your heart?”

But I only —- that this house becomes a home again; it’s time for a fresh new start.

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Anwsers: race, acre, care

This year we enjoyed an immensely satisfying Thanksgiving, filled with a harmonious family of 28 with ages ranging from 2 months to 85 years old, representing 4 different generations.  We hosted the event at our house, and I had adopted two tricks that my mother had used for large groups.  I listed a chore on place card so that everyone knew exactly how they could participate in food management; there would be no secret slackers.  Secondly, my mother would take two hats and put the halves of something in each hat, and then everyone would find their dinner partner by finding their other half.  One year it was nuts in one hat and screws in the other, another year it was two lines of a song, etc.  This year I decided to split up oxymorons into two hats, so jumbo had to find shrimp, pretty had to seek out ugly, military and intelligence were a duo, as were butt and head.  At the end of dessert, I ducked out for a couple of hours to go and visit my father.  My timing was impeccable.  By the time I returned, the entire Thanksgiving spread had been cleaned up and the group had settled into a post-dining mode.  At one end of the room, the guitars came out, the singing supplemented by the beautiful voice of a friend of my nephew who came at the last minute because his flight home had been cancelled – the perfect Thanksgiving lucky strike extra.  At the other end we started playing multiple different word games, and in the TV room there was a cadre of somnolent football fans working off the brain anemia associated with too much turkey and pie.

I could not help but think that this is what Christmas should be, but now we had a scant month to regroup and have essentially the same family event, but this time with the stakes raised with gifts.  For the past several years I had grown basically tired of Christmas, not because I was bah humbug, but because I thought that we already done the big warm fuzzy family thing to perfection.  The thought of shopping for the sole purpose of buying gifts was depressing.   This was the first year that I heard the Friday after Thanksgiving referred to as Black Friday, which I mistakenly thought described the dismal Christmas shopping season given the tanking economic environment.  So I was surprised to hear that “black” really referred to the moment that retailers could anticipate making their sustaining profits – the tepid sales during the rest of the year were only designed to keep them in a break even mode, until they could really kick ass in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  The amped up black Friday ads promoted confusing “door buster” sales at ridiculously early hours – one started at 4 AM.  I  couldn’t imagine that anyone would fall for this gimmick at such an early hour, so I set my alarm for a door buster sociology field trip at the more reasonable hour of 6AM.  This later hour also addressed my (presumably) irrational fear of driving away from home in the pre-dawn hours, worrying that this would be the very day that the sun would sputter out.  Typically I would be driving to the airport and I was always greatly relieved to see the first inklings of dawn and know that I would not be leaving home on the day the sun went dead. 

I cruised into the shopping mall at the still ridiculously early hour of 6:45 AM and was astonished to see that the parking lot was packed with cars jostling for spaces.  The other ironic aspect of this field trip was that I simply do not shop, and probably had not been to the mall for random shopping for 15 years.  My theory on clothing is that if you find something that you like, buy multiples, because they certainly won’t sell it again next year.  Ten years ago when I was last at Marshall Field’s I found the perfect bra, and astonished the saleslady by buying 20 of them.  Based on the way they have held up so far, I am confident and pleased that I secured a life time supply. 

I entered Marshall Field’s and was immediately overwhelmed with the quantity of merchandise.  The entry aisles were filled with generic gifts like scarves and gloves and then I hit the cosmetic section.  There was an idle and somewhat disheveled parfumier who looked like she had rolled in at 4 AM directly from the previous night’s party.  She said that business was pretty good.  Progressing to the central court, I saw parents toting huge shopping bags trailing crabby looking kids.  There was one rotund man sitting sound asleep on a bench surrounded by packages, presumably holding down the home front while the missus went on shopping forays.  I asked the salesperson in a toy store whether these early hours were paying off, and she said, “Well not as good as last year, where we actually had to break up some fights among shoppers trying to get the last discount.”   I eventually stopped at a kiosk that sold board games and word games – I’m definitely a sucker for these.  I asked for a door-buster discount, but was turned down.

As a young parent, I was eager to put on the show when the kids were younger and still full of wide eyed surprise.   But those days were gone. One December I was in the grocery store and spotted our elderly neighbor Mrs. Reed ahead of me, midst other women pushing their shopping carts and wearing execreable holiday themed sweaters with candy canes and reindeer.  I could tell that she was gearing up for another Christmas – her cart had odd things in it like chestnuts and whipped cream, and there was something about her body language that told me that she was also weary of Christmas.  I snuck up behind her and whispered in her ear, “Mrs. Reed are you sick of Christmas?”  She whirled around and said, “Yes, I am so glad that someone has said that!  As far as I can tell, my teenage grandchildren have everything they want and it seems so mercenary to just send a Christmas check.”  We were excited to share our kindred spirit. 

I enjoy buying gifts if I stumble upon something appropriate, which is pretty hit and miss given my aversion to shopping, but I also like making gifts.  But our teenage children have very particular tastes, and it makes sense on a number of levels to give them a holiday check.  However, I was in total agreement with Mrs. Reed on the mercenary aspect of a check.  So for several years I created a game of holiday Jeopardy where the kids had to answer questions of varying worth.  “Family pets, for $5, please. – Answer: The name of the Gramps’ dog that got run over by the mail man.  Question: Who is Fido?”   I had fun calling up their friends and finding little of nuggets of information that then became public knowledge.  But even this game had run its course, and this year we all collectively decided that there was no expectation that we would exchange gifts for Christmas.  We then went for 4 days to the chilly woods of Upper Peninsula of Michigan to peacefully and quietly celebrate Christmas.

It was perfect.  Nick gave me a box of Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils, which I really needed for Soduku since the dog had eaten my other supply.   I had stumbled upon a tiny portable wind generator for Nick that you can attach to your bicycle and use the energy to recharge batteries.  We both got Frances a massage, and Frances got Nick a pair of fur lined Crocs, but it was her gift presentation that was the most inspired.  Nick had come in the house tracking snow everywhere.  Clearly he needed a pair of shoes to change into and she ran up to her room to get them – unwrapped of course since she didn’t want to waste paper.  She leaned over the railing and saw that he was now starting to track snow up the stairs, so Frances simply dropped the shoes over the rail where they tumbled down the stairs, bounced up and startled Nick by hitting him in the back of the leg.  He turned around and said, “Oh, its perfect, a pair of indoor shoes.”  It was a joyful moment that perfectly caught the Christmas spirit.  That night we were eating dinner with some vacationers who were still going whole hog – totus porcus – over the holiday.  Their eyes widened with disbelief as we related the incidence.  But of course in the retelling, we left out the back story of our Christmas promise and the joy of the gift.  The story become the year when Frances threw her Christmas present at Nick and hit him in the leg.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e share the same letters) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

 Merchandizers tell us that Christmas will be dreary and unpleasant

 Unless everyone receives an exquisite store bought  *******

 Just like the hissing ******* who seduces Adam and Eve,

 And tempts them with gifts they want to receive.

 But the family that ******* and doesn’t succumb to this lure

 Can enjoy an unfettered Christmas spirit both simple and pure.

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Answer:  serpent, present repents

A couple of years ago we decided to break the pattern of our holiday celebrations, unchanged for the past 25 years.  Instead of traipsing from one suburb to the next to touch bases with as many family members as possible, we decided that the four of us would take off on a family vacation where the stress of Christmas and gift giving could be placed into the deep background.  So off we went on a guided “multi-sport” adventure to Ecuador, featuring mountain biking, horse back riding and river rafting. 

It was there at 8,000 feet in the Andes that I experienced the pleasures of the sag wagon, the vehicle that discretely follows behind you to transport the luggage while you are riding a bike, or to basically pick up the pieces in case you falter.  As we headed off on our bikes on the first day, I knew immediately that I would need the sag wagon early and often.  I am not a strong cyclist, and was further hobbled by the challenges of the high altitude and the uneven cobbled streets.  Plus as I scanned the rest of the group, I noticed that some of the other members were unveiling full spandex outfits, a style that is not only useless for me, but also particularly unbecoming.   We took off following along a ridge on a high slope.  As a Midwesterner used to totally flat rides – in fact I don’t think that I have ever used more than 2 or 3 gears – I was immediately intimidated by the undulating course.  Well at least I should be able to coast some of the time, I thought.  However, going downhill was even more difficult than up, since you had to creep along to avoid the potholes.  Using the brakes going downhill is not a good sign for an amateur cyclist who doesn’t like going up. 

I immediately fell behind and soon I spotted my family and everyone else two curves ahead of me and getting smaller all the time.  It heard a car sputtering behind me and as I stopped along side the rutted street I saw the blessed sag wagon.   Now here was the quandary – what kind of help did I want?  I certainly did not want to hold back the rest of the group who would have to periodically wait for me as I lumbered along, but on the other hand I did not want to make it so pathetically obvious that I was such a weenie.  I hit upon an artful compromise.  I asked the sag wagoneers if they wouldn’t mind stopping for a smoke or a drink at a café and then they could catch up with me, give me a ride to within a reasonable distance of the lead group, then they could have another drink or smoke, and then repeat.  That way I could leap frog along the route, triumphantly arriving at the lunch spot within 10-15 minutes of the rest of the group.  

The system seemed to work, though the sag staff was probably awash in drinks and dizzy from nicotine by the time I arrived.  The luncheon spread was set out in a grassy meadow overlooking a picturesque valley.  I realized that I also had a sag wagon team ahead of me, to arrange the lunch, pick out the picnic spot, make the hotel reservations, and probably prepare contingency plans if it was pouring rain.  I guess we are all a collection of intertwined emotional, psychological and physical sag wagons for each other, and the definition of a vacation is when you can set your own sag wagon down and hitch yourself to another.  And when you have sag wagons both fore and aft, well — what you now have is a more expensive vacation.

The next big biking day was more promising.  We drove to the top of a mountain and the idea was to coast down.  How hard could that be, particularly since this time instead of a rutted cobblestone road, it was a semi smooth paved road.  I felt quite confident that I could keep up with the spandex group – any idiot could coast.  I had forgotten about the sag wagon, assuming that I would not need one, and then I smelled the unpleasant odor of diesel gas, and there it was right behind me.  I bristled – clearly I didn’t need a hovering sag wagon in this situation.   There are times where you obviously need to circle every available wagon, there are times when you want the sag wagon in sight, and others where you just need the concept of a sag wagon, and there are situations where others can mercifully call in a sag wagon for you.  It was going to be hard to explain the subtleties of the length of the tether in my broken Spanish.  I wanted to tell them to take a long break, in fact as long as they wanted and just make one run down the mountain at the end of the day to make sure that I wasn’t splattered on the pavement.   Jose and Marcos settled in and I coasted down.

Pretty soon I was truly in the middle of nowhere totally wrapped up in a thick mist.  Every now and then the clouds would part to reveal a stunning view of patchwork subsistence farms and the occasional cow.  I moved steadily along and when the mists parted again I realized that once again I had fallen hopelessly behind.  Perhaps I was more timid than I thought and was not willing to fly down the twisting and turning road, which had multiple blind turns where you could get absolutely flattened by an oncoming truck and thrown over the steep and rocky slope next to the miniscule shoulder.  I tried to rationalize my slow pace by pretending that I was more appreciative of the scenery and the few birds, but the truth was that I was going as fast as I could.  Pretty soon the small dots of my companions disappeared entirely and I was alone.  There were several forks in the road and I just guessed the route, choosing the one that seemed to head down the most. 

I began to feel nervous – I had no identification on me and no money – it was all in the sag wagon that I had so casually dismissed.  I could envision the headline –“Unknown Amnesic Tourist Nursed Back to Health by Remote Ecuadorian Farmers.”   Although I was close to pushing the panic button, I realized that the lack of sag wagon would make a better character-building story, of triumph over adversity and of dogged persistence – though perhaps not on the same scale of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes who fended for themselves by cannibalizing their fallen companions for several months.   They finally realized that everyone had give up on them and no rescue was coming – they were entirely on their own.  Then one of them heroically climbed out of the Andes wearing nothing by his soccer shoes and a thin parka. 

I snapped out of my daydream as I again smelled the sweet scent of diesel.  I knew that I could have made it if I wanted, but I didn’t want to keep everyone waiting.  Besides, I was on vacation, and this vacation came with a sag wagon at my beck and call.  I hopped in and coasted down the mountain.

The missings words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like post, stop, spot) and the number of asterisks indicates that number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and context ot the poem. 

Even the most confident CEO full of bravura and *******

Can have a crisis of confidence or a nervous fluster.

His sag wagon may be discrete ******* or maids or even his wife

Who all try and pick up the pieces of his messy life.

Other days he lies on a couch and talks to a shrink

But most days he prefers something ******* like the gin that he drinks.

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Answers;  bluster, butler, subtler

As an anatomic pathologist, I am frequently in a dilemma when asked what kind of work I do.  For non-physicians the answer almost invariably requires further explanation.  Sometimes I include the explanation all in one breath, “I’m a pathologist.  We do autopsies and analyze anything that is removed at surgery, like an appendix or a lung.”  Most people outside the medical world have some vague idea of what a pathologist does, but this idea generally conjures up grisly images.  For many, pathology is equivalent to blood and guts, and a pathologist is some sort of social misfit working in some dank and poorly lit basement.  “OOO – doesn’t that have something to do with embalming?” asked one visibly nervous secretary. 

During my residency, I had collected various specimens from autopsies that showed the evils of smoking and drinking, including lungs and livers riddled with cancer or hearts showing the effects of hypertension or atherosclerosis.  They were all stored in a large bucket of formaldehyde that I would take to schools for a very vivid demonstration of the consequences of poor life choices.  At one school, a student raised her hand and earnestly asked, “Is someone making you do this job?”  One day my friend Rudd peered into my trunk and said “what’s in that big bucket?”  She was so intrigued that we immediately had an “organ recital” on her driveway, but her equanimity was unusual.  

Pathologists also don’t get much respect among the physician community.  The image is typically of the socially inept or English-as-a-second-language misfit who can’t hack it on the front lines of medicine.  It is perhaps not surprising that pathology departments are often located in the basement of the hospital.  There is a long standing joke stereotyping the different medical specialties, “Internists know everything and do nothing, surgeons know nothing and do everything, psychiatrists know nothing and do nothing and pathologists may know everything, but they are always a day late.”      

While television and the movies have generally portrayed physicians as over-sexed and overworked surgeons, pathologists have been largely ignored, with a few notable exceptions.  In a 1972 movie, the “Carey Treatment,” James Coburn plays the title role – a pathologist, of all things, who sets out to investigate the botched abortion and subsequent death of a colleague’s daughter and predictably becomes embroiled in the violent world of a drug cartel.  Dr. Carey embodies all the traits usually reserved for surgeons.  He is handsome, assumes that M.D. stands for “major deity” and surrounds himself with beautiful women.  He even mouths off to a surgeon over the OR intercom, “Do you want the diagnosis now or do you want it right?” 

The high point of the movie is when Dr. Carey, hospitalized for stab wounds, tussles with a would-be assassin.  When Carey gets the upper hand, the drug-crazed killer offers him a deal and begins to pray.  Dr. Carey then says the immortal words that have stereotyped surgeons for decades, “There is no God in this room, I make all the decisions.”  The writers of this movie must have thought that it was necessary to explain why a lowly pathologist had acquired the persona of a surgeon.  Early in the movie Carey confesses to one of his girlfriends that all he ever wanted to be when he grew up was a surgeon, but that “it didn’t work out.”  While the movie does manage to make a pathologist look like something better than a feeble misfit, one also gets the impression that such a career should not be anyone’s first choice. 

While casting Carey as a pathologist seemed like a curious choice, it began to make more sense when I realized that as a pathologist Carey can be both a physician and a detective, blending two of the basic staples of TV.  The TV show Quincy picked up on this theme.  Quincy was a crusading pathologist who risked his life to investigate crimes.  When we first met, my future husband decided to watch a “Quincy” episode to learn about what I was doing all day.  He was aghast to learn that pathologists routinely got shot at in the course of their work. 

 In 1982 I looked forward to the premier of “St. Elsewhere” which was billed as a real life look at residents in a decaying urban hospital.  However, from the first episode, it became clear that the writers had pegged the pathology department as the source of black humor.  Dr. Kathy Martin is a totally spacey pathologist and incidentally a nymphomaniac.  She seduces her living conquests on the mortuary tables and later gets raped there.  Another particularly grisly story line featured a pathologist selling body parts, specifically severed heads.  “St Elsewhere” didn’t do pathologists any favors by portraying this specialty as a type of punitive purgatory for wayward internists.  When Dr. Peter White is accused of Dr. Martin’s rape, all other medical privileges are stripped and he is sent (to the basement of course) to dabble harmlessly in pathology until the charges are investigated.  While he cannot treat patients, apparently he can practice pathology without any particular training.

CSI:Crime Scene Investigation is a current family of TV shows that builds on the basic Quincy formula, with a lot of extra sex and technology thrown in.  Instead of the aging Quincy, the detectives are either hunky men or women with exceptionally tight low cut shirts.  In Quincy, the opening credits featured the grizzly pathologist in front of a line of policemen.  Quincy says, “Welcome to the wonderful world of pathology.”  As he rips the shroud off one corpse, all the policemen faint like a row of falling dominoes.  CSI certainly includes plenty of blood and guts, but manages to glamorize the whole mess with exquisite slow motion simulations of bullets splintering skulls and shredded arteries spurting blood.  The set is filled with all sorts of prop machines with blinking lights while the cast meticulously recreates crime scenes in artfully underlit sets of dark blue light. 

 Now I have worked in the city morgue, and I can tell you it was nothing like CSI.  Every morning we would file into the over air-conditioned morgue that was so brightly lit you wanted to put on a jacket and sun glasses.  Corpses gathered from the previous day were arrayed on stainless steel autopsy tables.  You were supposed to eye all the bodies and then go stand next to the one that you wanted to work on.  It was like picking out a blind date, only a whole lot creepier.  There was occasionally a murder case, which was a lot more work than the “DIBs” patients (i.e. dead in bed).  It was assumed that these poor souls had died of natural causes and thus warranted no more than a cursory autopsy.  Occasionally the chief coroner would sweep into the room like a minor deity, particularly if there was some case that might require a press conference.  Dr. Stein had become a faddish celebrity in Chicago when corpses of dozens of victims were unearthed under the basement of John Wayne Gacy, who held the top spot of serial killer for several years.  Dr. Stein also was in the news during a prolonged heat wave in Chicago that killed many elderly people.  I remember his complaint was not so much that the people had died, but that he was running out of storage room in the morgue. 

Certainly forensic pathology has advanced in the past 25 years with fluids and fibers taking center stage, but even discounting the march of technology, it didn’t look like Dr. Stein contributed anything to the examination, and certainly the pathologists in the morgue were no crusading crime fighters like Quincy or the CSI cast.  I remember one beautiful spring day we all felt like a road trip, and someone suggested that we visit a crime scene and try to find a bullet.  Four of us hopped into someone’s convertible and arrived at what looked like a peaceful leafy neighborhood.  We walked around to the back to inspect a porch where the crime had supposedly been committed.  A bunch of neighborhood residents were hanging out on the porch, some were smoking dope.  When we explained who we were, the residents visibly relaxed, and one said out loud to the group, “Don’t worry, its not vice, it’s just homicide.”   We chatted with the folks for a while, made a token look for an embedded bullet, and then called it a day, headed back to the office, and wrote up a report saying that despite a diligent search, no bullet was found.  No estimating angles, laser beams tracing a bullet’s path, and no discussion of whether or not the weapon was a Glock with a right twist.

So what do I care if the TV shows are unrealistic?  With three different versions of CSI on the air, all in endless reruns on cable TV, I should embrace the newfound glamour and respect for pathologists.  When someone asks what I do, I will now say with pride and conviction, “I am a pathologist, like CSI on TV.  We solve crimes and make the world a safer place.”

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like spot, stop and post) and the asterisks indicate the number of letters.  One of the missing words will rhyme with either the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

As the autopsy starts, the pathologist reaches for her —— knife,

 Slices open the body and searches for why this soul lost his life.

 She inspects lungs and bowels that still glisten and quiver,

 And samples each organ by cutting out a representative ——.

 It turns out that human —— look just like what you buy at the store,

 That’s why she has no longer eats organ meats for dinner any more.

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Answers:  silver, sliver, livers