Friday, June 23, 2017

* Dr. Duct Tape and Digital Colleagues


Columns

                 

Paul Keane:

Three generations of digital

healers:

Dr. Duct Tape, Dr. Cardiac

and Dr. Neighbor

Paul Keane grew up in Mt. Carmel. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching English for 25 years.
Paul Keane grew up in Mt. Carmel. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching English for 25 years.


The “healing hand” is a famous ancient symbol associated with the shaman’s “touch”, which heals the sick.
My doctor for the last 15 years is a true healer, and also the author of a well known Vermont book: “Bag Balm and Duct Tape, Tales of a Vermont Doctor” (1989).
It’s the story of a young city-trained doctor who came to Vermont and how his country patients, in a town the author calls “Dumster”, taught him to be the kind of countrified doctor his patients were used to, and wanted to keep around.
His real name is Dr. Beach Conger and he’s about to turn 77. He retired three years ago from a practice in Ascutney, Vermont near my home, but he kept a second practice in Burlington where he lives.

I asked if I could follow him there, even though it’s a 90 minute drive, and he said “yes.”
I didn’t want to lose a doctor who speaks in down-to-earth images. Bag balm and duct tape are just the kind of medicine I understand. But the larger lesson in Beach Conger’s book is that a good doctor in many ways becomes the doctor his patients teach him to be.
Even a 77, Dr. Conger keeps this lesson fresh.
I communicate with him through email between our semi-annual visits, and he has willingly obliged me as a digital doctor, often saving me the drive to Burlington by dashing off an email reassurance or admonition.
He even gave me his personal email address when I told him I was having difficulty getting through to him at his office email address.
In the last five years there have been two other digital doctors in my life.
One is 59 and a cardiologist. He is amazingly responsive to email questions and always answers me within 24 hours, even though he is head honcho of his department, in other words, a big shot.
He, like the semi-fictional doctor in Bag Balm and Duct Tape, is letting his patients teach him what they want in a doctor, and digital interaction is definitely part of the modern patient’s expectations. When I first went to him a dozen years ago, email communication was not part of his repertoire
(Not that I’m a “modern” patient at age 72 , but I am a digital devotee.).
The third digital doctor just got his medical degree two years ago at nearby Dartmouth College. He is definitely a member of the digital generation.
He lives next door to me in Hartford Village, Vermont and even though he has not been my official doctor, he was coincidentally on duty in the emergency room a couple of years ago when I walked in having a heart attack.
He and I already had a digital relationship as neighbors because his dog kept escaping his electric fence and I would text him at the ER that the dog was loose and I was bringing him home.
But back to the heart attack.
The ER folks put me on a gurney with an intravenous drip and hooked me up to electrical patches to monitor my heart.
I was prisoner, tied down electrically in a tiny room behind a curtain at 4 a.m., text messaging a woman friend about my situation.
All of a sudden my neighbor doctor stuck his head through the curtain and asked, “What are you doing here, Paul?.”
“Having a heart attack, I think,” I replied.
Although he wasn’t assigned to my case, we had already established a long text message thread over his dog and he told me, “I’m on duty all day so text me and let me know how you are doing.”
I texted him throughout the day, even when I had a stent inserted surgically in my cardiac artery, and his digital hand-holding cheered me enormously, especially since he was a doctor and knew exactly what was happening to my body.
In three different ways these doctors from three different generations (77, 59, about 28) --- Dr. Bag Balm, Dr. Cardiac, and Dr. Neighbor --- all represent a new kind of medical hand-holding: pressing the flesh through a keyboard --- a 21st century kind of healing hand.

Paul Keane grew up in Mt. Carmel. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching English for 25 years.