Heart of Caring: Septic Shock, Chapter 9
Book Excerpt“It’s only rock and roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do.”
Rolling Stones
As interns and residents, we somehow found time to form a rock-and-roll band called Septic Shock. We were “THE WORLD’S BEST ALL-DOCTOR ROCK-AND-ROLL BAND FROM MGH.” No one argued with this claim. We played, mostly for free, at parties paid for by pharmaceutical companies. They bought the beer and wine. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it. It was 1979.
We had a few paying jobs at private parties. We were actually good. I played saxophone and still do. I play too loud and use too many notes until I get the hang of a song. They even let me sing one song—“I’m going to wait for the midnight hour. That’s when my love comes tumbling down.” The vocal range was three to four notes.
“Imagine how good we would be if we practiced.”
In the early eighties, at the end of my residency, Congress decided to open up medical care to for-profit corporations. The wisdom and efficiency of market forces would control costs and bring order and the appreciation of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. I wish, you wish, we all wish.
It makes no more sense to privatize medical care the way we have than it does to privatize fire departments and allow them to sell variable degrees of coverage with co-payments and deductibles. They probably wouldn’t cover some cities at all—like, say, Baltimore. Why should my taxes pay for your fire? Corporations got to buy what once belonged to everyone and rent it back to us one patient at a time.
While Congress was green-lighting for-profit health insurance and giving away drug patents to the pharmaceutical industry, thus relieving them of the need to do research, I went from being an ordinary guy to one who could be in charge of ICUs and pediatric emergency rooms and put chest tubes in one-pound babies. And I could and did start IVs half asleep.
My favorite scene in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes when Sundance admits that he doesn’t want to jump from the cliff into the river, because he doesn’t know how to swim.
“Are you crazy?” says Butch. “The fall will probably kill you.”
As scary as it might seem to question the powers that be, we have no real choice. We have to hold hands with our patients and jump.
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