My wife often poses the joke “Do you know the difference between doctors and God?” with the punchline being “God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” The atrocious behavior of my neurosurgeon made me wonder: How does anyone get away with acting like this?
In part one of my deep brain stimulation to fix the tremors in my hands, two holes are drilled into my skull while my head was secured in place by a metal cage with a plexiglass box fitted over it. I was sedated to a level where I was awake but didn’t feel any pain when the drill bit went through my skull, although I could hear it—a sound indescribable yet at the same time unforgettable.
What I also heard was the surgeon continually yelling at the staff, “What I want you to do is just stand there and not move. There is not a thing you can do for me. I guess I must do everything myself. Just stand there and don’t move.” Soon after, I heard him say, “This equipment is so dated. I mean like it’s twenty years old. Why can’t we get any new equipment? My god, this is the end of days. Why do I have to work with this stuff?”
All of this after checking into the hospital one day, being told the surgeon was called away to an emergency and rescheduled for the next day at noon, and then being called in a panic by his office that he was running ahead of schedule and if I could get there at 10 a.m. We rushed to get there at the appointed time only to wait and wait after arriving at the operating room. Getting on the elevator to the operating room, the surgeon said, “I’m going to go have a cup of coffee.” I think he had more than a cup.
In the of American medicine The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, Paul Starr wrote, “The key source of physicians’ economic distress in 1900 remained the continuing oversupply of doctors, now made much worse by the increased productivity of physicians as a result . . . [of the] squeezing of lost time from the professional working day.”
Hellbound and Down 