the doctor behind the curtain.
Three years have elapsed since they sent me to medical Cherem, that Spinoza genre of exile, a step short of shunning. My salary still gets direct deposited into my checking account. On the Center’s Annual Doctor’s Day an invitation still comes to attend the luncheon where I leave with a Kewpie Doll of some type printed with our center’s logo. Once a year I get to lecture to the third-year students about the changing epidemiology of diabetes and to the second-year students studying pharmacology about how the expanding array of oral hypoglycemics work. The course directors even let me submit two questions a year to each course for their quarterly and final exams. But instead of seeing patients at the Diabetes Center, providing input to three committees including one important one, and preparing our institution’s diabetes outcomes data, my reassignment replaces activities of professional advancement with more make work projects of escorting visiting dignitaries from Senators to Playmates of the Month on their tours of our campus. My lawyer got me a pretty good settlement to extricate me from unwarranted efforts to put me into unequivocal medical oblivion, but license and income indefinitely secure, I have completed my grieving process over lost prestige, doing my best to nurture a somewhat backhanded effort at merging independence and innovation, though without the institutional resources that I once shared.
Despite functioning behind a curtain of the same cloth they provide Naked Emperors, it does not take a lot of resources to create a medical niche, now that my attorney and I no longer have any more persecutions. My medical knowledge remains mine to be shared. Victor Frankl, that renowned psychiatrist who endured ordeals far more severe than mine, long ago convinced me that how I respond to my circumstances is mine alone. With knowledge and attitude affirmed, my imagination has no upper limit. My office habitat, while smaller than when I was more visible, still has a desk, a chair that swivels, my own telephone extension, electrical outlets to support my laptop, and use of the Center’s computer availability. Maybe most important, it has a door marked as my territory with the sterling Mezuzah my daughter gifted me one Father’s Day.
Pariahs still have opportunities to enhance humanity by emerging from obscurity, a kept promise to every interviewer in the medical school admissions pageant decades ago. Some require intensive searching but more often those opportunities arrive unannounced, not always in a way that forces attention. Moreover, with minimal risk of further loss, I find myself more bold, less restrained by institutional culture.
My past ignominy and restoration has drawn me to those souls who float inconspicuously in and out of the front doors of our health centers, pharmacies, insurance beneficiary rolls, and too often our penitentiaries that discourage penitence. Those people linger out there, abundantly out there. While people have always stratified in unequal distributions, perhaps in my own day more than any other, a few places still suppress those gradients in status. Our public schools accepted me and anyone else of appropriate age and place of residence. Our sports arenas or airlines charge differently for seats but we root for the home team and get to our destinations together. Perhaps the most equitable patches of earth may be our interstates, open to anyone with a car willing to drive safely, and a fair number who are not. And cyberspace may have emerged as the least hierarchical place in the universe.
Thus my presence, maybe even my mission for my professional Second Act: the Dear Electronic Highway Provider of medical cyberspace. Pseudonym registered as a Trademark. Just my mind supplemented by an ability to navigate a keyboard retained from 9th grade Intro to Typing class. Confirmation of the Talmudic Sage’s prediction that “the best physicians are destined for Gehenna,” though I’ve not yet arrived. A small investment in a web site with some graphics, and now anybody with internet access and some English literacy can share my knowledge and experience, comment whether they prefer to praise or attack what they have just read on their screens, even be a troll if that is their own psychological baggage. So who seeks answers from the anonymous medical Wise Man who designed his own Reset Button, one without that Who, Where, When, and Why that they insist upon when they are willing to pay for personal care?
Well, that doc beneath the rock with only keyboard, the one nobody really sees, has a surprising amount to offer. Build it and they will come, the stadium visionary realized. He was right. They are coming, people left behind. I could have been left behind too, but put every effort into my professional albeit sometimes surreptitious reentry. And a lot of patients need their own reentries, be it from shabby bodily care, a bad hand in the gene pool, or other forms of misfortune. And not everyone at my medical center where a low profile has been forced upon me really wants the most downtrodden to succeed. I’ve been the most downtrodden. I want them back in the mainstream.