My Kid Brother, the Doctor
It’s not often that my father raises his glass to offer a toast.But in a Cajun restaurant in downtown Columbia last Saturday, as the aroma of filé powder and paprika worked their voodoo on our appetites, Dad rose to his feet. Glass in hand, he faced his son and the room fell silent.An hour earlier, we had dabbed at tears as my brother had been hooded a physician by the University of Missouri School of Medicine.“Michael didn’t always want to be a doctor,” Dad began. “When he was eight, he told me he wanted to be a professional basketball player. I said, ‘Okay.’ I thought I’d better let him figure out those odds on his own.”The room chuckled. We remember that bright-eyed, platinum-haired kid. He was good at sports. As in, really good. His soccer team made it to state. Receiving his tennis serve still terrifies me, and he can deadlift more weight than most men twice his size.But Dad was right; instead of professional basketball, Michael gravitated toward engineering, where he excelled in levels of math and science unexplored by the vast majority of humankind (I had never even heard of several of his classes).Gone was the goofy tagalong who colored Star Wars pictures for his four older sisters. Who waited by the window, counting down the minutes until his sisters would emerge from the woods on their walk home after school. Who shot hoops with our dates while we finished getting ready, helped us get the cows back in and traversed the national parks with us.Bored Kids on a FarmRewind to the year 1980. After our Dad married his California-girl ER nurse, our parents had a couple of babies on the West Coast—(my debut!)—then moved back to Dad’s hometown in the rural Missouri Ozarks. In those days, the town had only one stoplight and the telephone lines didn't extend to our new neighborhood. My Beethoven-playing, city-girl mother must have thought she had arrived at the ends of the earth.
As bored kids growing up on a farm without television, we got creative: we'd sneak into Dad’s closet and get our hands on his old, black alligator skin medical bag. It was an icon he had received upon graduating from Tulane University Medical School. Inside were our “toys”—a reflex hammer we walloped each other mercilessly with and a stethoscope that may or may not have been used as a whip. (How long is the statute of limitations, again?)Dad occasionally still made rural house calls in those days—especially if a patient didn’t have transportation or was too fragile to move. The doctor's bag looked like a prop off the set of Little House on the Prairie, but when Dad needed it, out came that black bag and, a time or two, a holler of, “Hey, where’s my stethoscope?” He often returned home from work with deer meat, trout or banana bread as payment. Rural physicians are called to do what they do, that I have come to believe.A Beautiful MindI have never before known anyone to devour and retain knowledge like my brother. He has an insatiable hunger for understanding the logic, physicality and causes behind everything from the energy in the universe to the proteins found in cancer cells to political wars and human psychology.As an undergraduate, my brother began to drive me a little bit nuts. He had discovered that he was plenty smart (and plenty stubborn—like his older sister), and would argue his point into the ground on just about anything. And that just wasn’t fun for anyone besides him. We butted heads and I found myself rolling my eyes and telling him I was worried about his future. But it turned out to be a phase, and who knows, maybe it was me and not him anyway (it was him). At any rate, it gets better, so keep reading.I vividly remember the first time I realized my brother was brilliant (our mother had been telling us so since his pre-Kindergarten screening, during which he asked if he should communicate in French or English). He was nearing the end of his undergraduate years in biomedical engineering when he asked me, “Hey Jenn, do you want to hear about the lasers I’m working on in the lab?” “Sure,” I said, no idea what I had just committed to. He then went on to explain in extraordinary detail for 40 minutes – let me repeat that – for 40 minutes the minutiae of lasers and how they could detect skin cancer. He didn't have notes or a textbook to refer to. He was winging it. His retention of highly complex details and terminology was astounding, his excitement evident. After 40 minutes of lasers, I interrupted him to ask, “How the heck do you remember all of that?” I’ve interviewed some pretty bright people, including world leaders and cutting-edge researchers and a Nobel laureate, but I hadn’t witnessed anything quite like my brother’s mind at that moment.Michael, like his four older sisters, was repeatedly told three things growing up: “We're proud of you,” “Don’t worry about what others think,” and “You can be whatever you want to be one day.” We were told that so often by our Mom and Dad, and with such love and sincerity, that we never doubted it.And here we all were, thinking that our little brother was going to be an engineer.But then, as Dad pointed out in his toast, there was that moment where Michael pivoted from his engineering track and simply announced, “I think I want to go to medical school.”From Kid to Friend to PhysicianAt Saturday’s dinner, there was a moment in which the conversation faded into the background and I thought back to the first time I glimpsed my brother's metamorphosis into a doctor. I had just lost another baby to a terrible condition known as an “ectopic pregnancy.” Each loss had left another scar on my abdomen and a hole in my heart that I knew the grief journey would, over time, heal. But this latest surgery had stripped away almost all odds of having more children. Even though I had fine doctors in West Plains and St. Louis, it was Michael who talked me through the human body, through chance and circumstance, through gratitude, and where a life goes from here. Our private conversations helped to heal me.As Michael entered his third year of medical school, someone I cared about received a diagnosis that I was struggling to wrap my head around. Again, I privately confided in my brother, who clearly and confidently explained to me the biological and environmental aspects of the condition, and the latest research behind the diagnosis. He offered me the instruction, resources and encouragement I needed to play the role of supporter. He kept calling to check in. He heard my voice crack in exasperation and he drove four hours to visit (actually, probably more like two hours the way he drives). All joking aside, I was convinced he had what it takes; the perfect blend of book smarts, intuition, and human compassion.'Uncle' Michael, En Route to Anesthesiology
If you’ve read this far, then you might as well hear about what a cool uncle Michael is. It’s really not fair. None of us sisters can understand it; all the nieces and nephews like him the best when, frankly, he really couldn’t care less about being liked. Here we all are bending over backward to buy toys and catch frogs and save the planet for those kids—and all Michael has to do is sleep in late, meander downstairs and BAM! – the nieces and nephews flock to him, begging for his attention. Whatever it is, he's got it (and we'd really like for him to share it, thank you very much).At a rotation for anesthesiology at The Cleveland Clinic, my brilliant young brother had an experience that triggered something in him. I wasn’t there, but I believe it went something like this: he was observing a major surgery when the patient coded. In that high-stakes, adrenaline-fueled moment, the surgeon’s hands went up and, like clockwork, the anesthesiologist calmly stepped in and took control of the OR. The anesthesiologist brought the patient back to the realm of the living, and once the patient was stable, the anesthesiologist slipped away and let the surgeon resume. “I want to do that,” Michael told me as he recalled the dramatic scene.And so, he will. He’s packing his bags and headed to one of the world’s best hospitals for his first job. He's taken the Oath of Geneva, a physician's pledge to consecrate his life to the service of humanity through medicine. He's just been awarded the Parker B. Francis Award for Excellence in Anesthesiology.A Sacred Family GiftAt Saturday night’s dinner table, a large box had been sitting with the other gifts all evening. Michael reached in and pulled out an object surrounded by tissue paper. As he unwrapped it, our curiosity grew. It had been a couple of decades since we’d cast eyes on that old, leather doctor's bag. But when we recognized it, several of us gasped. Michael, stunned, looked up at Mom and Dad. They were smiling.
Michael unlatched the buckle. Inside was our toy-turned-weapon, the reflex hammer. And our old friend, Mr. Stethoscope! The name engraved in gold, Michael R. Moore, M.D. had a dual meaning now.The bag was a symbol of Dad’s nearly 50-year career. We savored the transition of something sacred to us as a family: the practice of medicine and how profoundly it affects the human experience—both those being treated and those treating.Our dad has a gift for packing a punch in few words. He's a Lincoln fan, and we grew up hearing about how Honest Abe delivered the Gettysburg Address in less than three minutes. It’s called brevity (and clearly, I didn’t inherit it). Dad ended his toast by raising a glass to the field of medicine’s gain, Dr. Michael Moore.So good luck, kid. Go get 'em, and we'll see you soon in Cleveland. (And hey, I hear they've got a decent basketball team there in case the anesthesiology thing doesn't work out. But I've got a good feeling about this one).