Describing the elephant

I had the occasion this week to meet with Dr. Hazle, my "primary care physician" as the insurance company knows him and my "family doctor" as I think of him. My family has been seeing him for about 19 years. 

We first started going to him when our new HMO plan required us to find someone in the their network.  Margi was pregnant with a being who was to become Abby.  We had already decided to pursue a home birth (just as we did with Alice) and we were were preparing ourselves for a furrowed brow as our new doctor (chosen from a list by proximity) would inevitably tell us we were making a big mistake.  But Dr. Hazle, as it turned out, was interested.  He had been a nurse before he was a doctor and had spent time in Europe where having midwives was not such an uncommon thing.  He wanted to meet our midwife and learn more.  And that attitude pretty much has been the standard of healthcare I have enjoyed for 19 years; a doctor who always seems interested in the art and science of healing in a way that always brings my perspectives into the context of a discussion about health and whatever the current little annoyance is that brings me in to his office.  He always seems to be learning and also seems to be enjoying learning more about his craft.  It is really great having someone who knows a little bit about the arc of your family history witnessing your changes and seeing you as a total person and trying to figure out the best way to approach achieving your health and comfort.  A good family doctor sees you as a person and not as a disease.

You've heard the story of the group of blind men trying to describe an elephant.  Each person describes his experience from his particular point of view, none of them agreeing on the nature of an elephant.  That is what the world of specialists that I've been thrown into seems like to me.  I am grateful for their enormous expertise on a single aspect of my health.  I am grateful that I have health insurance that allows me access to these experts without worrying how much it is going to cost.  But what I am finding is that this narrow focus leaves a complex system like a human body wanting.  Each procedure or surgery has one or two little annoying complications that seem to fall outside the expertise of the expert.  These combined annoyances really impact quality of life.  You need someone who can see the whole elephant at once.

A good example is this unproductive cough that no one has been able to explain to me.  I keep having my own theories as to why I have a cough but it seems to be a subject that falls outside the expertises of surgery, hematology, oncology, nutrition, ENT (vocal cord therapy), radiology and psychology.  Yet this cough seems to be at the root of my discomfort and many of the air-pressure based complications that keep arising.  It went away temporarily when I had the vocal cords "fixed" but has been creeping back to annoy me.

Having a Dr. Hazle willing to look at my "extras" knowing that some of them are humiliating to me and pretty minor in the scope of things and then go on to explain them to me in a way that alleviates my anxiety and puts them into perspective is a pretty priceless service.  The fact that he knows what I do and the name of my wife and children and what they do is a real humanizing bonus.  Everyone should have that; not just those with the good fortune to be employed by someone (or have a spouse employed by someone) who provides decent health insurance.  I'm sad for those who are not as fortunate as me in that way.

All I have to do is open my eyes and pay attention and I see so many people I would not want to trade places with.  Cancer may have a shot at killing me, but today I still look fantastic, am in reasonably good spirits and have an army of support on my side.  I can live with a little cough.