American Boy - Larry Watson [7]
I couldn’t be sure exactly when Johnny’s medical education began, but I knew to the minute when mine did. I was eight years old, and I woke on a summer night to find Dr. Dunbar sitting on the edge of my bed. I knew who he was, but only vaguely. At that point Johnny and I were only friends as part of a larger group of same-aged boys, and I didn’t associate him with the physician I’d seen for a school checkup. But that night Dr. Dunbar turned on the light beside my bed and softly spoke my name. “Matthew? Matt?” He patted my leg tenderly.
As soon as he thought I was fully awake, Dr. Dunbar said, “Matthew, your father is dead.”
I barely had time to gasp before he went on. “He was killed in an automobile accident.”
“What ... what happened?”
“He ruptured his spleen.” Dr. Dunbar was to be forgiven for this response. I’d wanted to know about the accident itself, but he’d answered according to how his profession interpreted curiosity. “Do you know where your spleen is?”
I shook my head. Dr. Dunbar reached over and pressed three fingers against my abdomen. He poked hard to impress me with that area’s softness and vulnerability, and to make certain I understood what he was telling me.
“His spleen ... ruptured?”
“The spleen’s job,” he explained, “is to filter out impurities in the blood. It’s enclosed in a thin capsule, and when that capsule ruptures, blood rushes into the abdominal cavity. When that happens, no one can survive for long.”
Then he subtly shifted from a physician’s rough tour of anatomy to a family friend’s gentle rub. “I’m sorry, Matthew. Your father thought the world of you. He was a good man. We’ll all miss him.” Did Dr. Dunbar know these things to be true of my father, or was he simply trying to help me feel better?
Dr. Dunbar’s strategy for breaking the news about my father’s death was unusual, but it worked as well as anything could. Detailing that fatal injury had the simultaneous—and paradoxical—effect of hitting me hard with the stark fact of his death and diffusing the force of that blow. With my stomach still tender from the pressure of the doctor’s fingers, I had to concentrate on the physical reality of death, and that diverted me momentarily from thinking about what life would be like without my father. And then on some level I was also flattered that Dr. Dunbar believed I was mature and intelligent enough to handle the hard fact of death along with its complicated physiology.
Dr. Dunbar waited another moment to make sure of my composure, and then said, “Why don’t you get up now. Your mother needs you.”
With Dr. Dunbar’s hand resting gently on my shoulder, we moved into the living room, where my mother sat quietly weeping. Her brother was there too, and as I walked into my mother’s arms, in the instant before my own tears commenced, I looked over at my uncle and thought, I know where the spleen is.
Had Dr. Dunbar already seen something in me before that night, something that led him to conclude I had promise as a physician? And when I took the news of my father’s death without wincing, did he realize that I might have the ability to perform a doctor’s most difficult task—to look into someone’s eyes and give them the hardest news they could ever get? Or had I impressed him with my question about the spleen, suggesting a curiosity that could not be quelled even in the darkest moment?
Whenever our “education” began, Johnny and I were well embarked on our unofficial course of study by the time we were teenagers. In fact, if patients consented, we were occasionally allowed to be present during a treatment or examination. When June Dunbar complained of an earache, for example, Dr. Dunbar let us look through the otoscope, and pointed out the swollen red membrane that indicated an ear infection. And he once summoned us to the clinic to witness