Your Medical Mind_ How to Decide What Is Right for You - Jerome Groopman [14]
Despite the drastic changes, our home was anything but dour. My parents had a lively sense of humor. My mother loved to laugh in response to my father’s wordplay. He delighted in funny phrases, many of them expressions only partly translated from the original Yiddish into English. One of his favorites was, “Es tieten bahnkis,” the last word having a silly dual-syllable resonance: bahn-kis. The loose translation is, “It’s as effective as cupping,” and the meaning was, “It’s useless.” Cupping was an Eastern European folk remedy. You put a small amount of alcohol in the bottom of a glass cup with a wick, lit it, and then placed the hot cup on the ailing person’s back. The idea was that the heat and vacuum from the evaporated alcohol would suck out the harmful humors that led to the illness. This method was a throwback to an outmoded medical belief that diseases were caused by an imbalance of various humors (that is, fluids like phlegm, blood, and bile) in the body. Bahnkis was one of many specious beliefs about what caused illness and the ridiculous ways to remedy it. In my house, naturalism was seen as part of this primitive past, practiced by village shamans and benighted elders. Modern science had replaced this naive reliance on nature and the body’s ability to heal itself. Not surprisingly, medical researchers stood on a pedestal in my home. We considered Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin to be as heroic in their battles against polio as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had been in the war that brought my father to France.
In college, I was drawn to the intellectual dimension of human biology, how cells and tissues and organs work through DNA and RNA and proteins. A life could be devoted to figuring out why these essential components go awry and result in disease. I was in part imagining myself as the medical sleuth, the clinical detective on the hunt for the hidden perpetrator that threatened the life of a patient. And then I encountered illness, not in a textbook or classroom, but in my family.
On a warm spring night in 1974, I saw my father struggle to live. At the time, I was in my second year of medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in Manhattan. My family lived in Queens in a neighborhood of small homes and apartments not far from a local hospital. I had been asleep when my mother called and told me in a frantic voice that my father had had a heart attack, and she had taken him to that hospital.
In less than an hour, I was at his side. The hospital was a small four-story structure made of brick painted white. My father was in the emergency room. There were six beds, each separated by a flimsy curtain. A middle-aged physician unknown to me or my mother was on call that night. My mother and I gripped each other in silence as we watched my father gasp for air. He was bolt upright in bed, his hair in disarray, matted down by sweat. His warm, ruddy complexion had turned an ivory white, and his eyes were rolled upward. An intravenous line had been inserted in his arm, and from a catheter above his collarbone, the doctor was removing pints of bright red blood.
“You should leave now,” the doctor said.
My mother and I retired to a small waiting area next to the ER. I looked at the clock and saw the hour hand approach two. Less than thirty minutes later, the doctor came out with a grim face and told us that Seymour Groopman had died. He was fifty-five years old and the center of my life.
My father’s death cast along shadow over my life and the life of my family. He was never far from my mind during my internship and residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). There, other men in their fifties, who also smoked, had put on weight, and had high blood pressure, came “crashing,” as the hospital jargon put it, into the emergency