This post was written in October 2007, when I was just starting to read blogs and thought it would be fun to blog myself. I subsequently decided I really didn't think people cared what I had to say and I have a hard time keeping up with stuff like this. This post has been sitting on my blogger since then. I thought it would be interesting to post it as life has changed a lot since then and yet it hasn't really changed much at all.
I am finally entering the blog world as the last member of the band to do this blogging thing. I guess I'm also the second member of the family, so I'm pretty much just succumbing to peer pressure at this point. I rarely can think of interesting things to say to anonymous people or strangers so there is very little hope that this blog will be all that exciting. I mainly wanted to have a place to vent my thoughts about the things that go on in my life and see where it leads. While I don't necessarily think my life is particularly exciting or newsworthy, as I've been reading others blogs and I realize that can be fun to read about your friends, family or anonymous stranger's lives. So here goes...
I am a doctor and a bass player; the two passions I have spent most of my life pursuing, hence the name of the blog. I have always loved music from the time I was a little boy singing Neil Diamond. I grew up playing upright string bass in classical orchestras, and studying for hours each week to become as good a bass player as I could be. Since then, I have enjoyed music as an outlet for stress and an instrument of praise and worship, but my focus moved toward medical school about my 7th grade year when I got a C in PE and realized I better get myself together or I wouldn't have the grades to get into medical school. I know that sounds crazy, but I actually thought that. I cannot remember a time when I didn't want to be a physician. The voice inside my head was always calling me to be the best at everything I did, which was the burden I remember carrying until I made it to medical school and realized everybody else there had the same exact voice in their head (yeah...medical students are crazy) and I didn't have the energy (or brains) to compete for the top of my class anymore...so I took up golf. The rest is history.
God has blessed me with a beautiful and incredible wife Adrianne, who is the love of my life. We met in college at APU, we were married and began attending the Grove in 2002. We tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant and found we needed IVF to have a biological child. This was when I can look back and see how life began to change for us. Until that point we were kind of living the "American Dream" and life was on what seemed to me like a "normal" trajectory. How comfortable it was.
I would never give up the experiences we have had since, for I can see God working in me even now through the tough times. After months of injections for Adrianne and surgical procedures which included ovaries the size of softballs, we found out we were having a baby girl. Our lives would be forever changed. I've delivered probably 50-60 babies in my life, but I had never truly appreciated the wonder or the overwhelming pain of it all until I saw the look in Adrianne's eyes when the contractions got intense. I can still see it like a photograph in my mind. Her eyes were showing the pain, but there was more than that -- a bond which is more than words can describe. Our miracle daughter Karissa was born March 29, 2005. It's amazing the immense hope you have when you bring your child home for the first time. The first day of school, the piano recitals, graduations all were flashing through my mind as I scanned her nursery with a video camera that first day.
Two weeks later I was playing a gig with Adam, Mike and Scott at the Grove Grille. We brought Karissa home after a particularly long drive due to the 91/215/60 interchange construction and took her into the kitchen in the car seat. The next 10 minutes are like a bad dream which I can't get out of my head even 2 1/2 years later. I took my 2 week old daughter out of her car seat and she was blue and stiff like a plastic toy doll and my medical brain told me "she's dead." She wasn't breathing. She was staring straight ahead with her arms extended. I can't count how many pediatric life support classes I've taken in my life. I can put an IV in an infant's tibia bone. I can put a tube down their trachea to breathe for them. I can give them the right drugs and doses to keep them alive, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what to do with my own child. All I did was yell "you can't be dead!" over and over. Adrianne called 911 frantically and the paramedics were there in 2 minutes, but it seemed like an hour. I managed to listen to her chest for a heartbeat (not the correct answer on the test just for those medical professionals in training) and heard her heart racing along at about 180 beats per minute. I heard her take a big gasp of air and slowly her color came back and she began moving again. The paramedics arrived and they took her to the hospital.
The hospital is a cold place when you're a patient. I never noticed that until I was one. It's also unbearably slow when you are scared. And we were. We were in the hospital with Karissa for about 4 days and did not find a cause for her seizures. I remember a conversation with Adrianne we had when grandma and grandpa were watching Karissa and we had a few moments alone. I remember the pain when she said God has a plan for this. I said "I don't believe in a God who would cause our daughter to have seizures," I was angry. We had so many friends and family who were there for us, but I felt empty and alone. Adrianne wanted me to pray for her and I did, but I don't really think I meant it.
Sad you can grow up in the church and have all the support in the world, but somehow that doesn't mean much if you can't call on Him and know that He is there. It's all about relationship and at that moment I feel like my experience of God was the one who helped me get through medical school and get married to the right girl and buy my house at the right time. The "god" of the "American Dream." It wasn't about a relationship that God wanted to have with me and share with me it was about God on my terms, in my own image. I am finding out what I always knew in my head that Jesus came along side and loved the broken people, the scared people, the sad people. He didn't really get all excited about the people who had it all together. I needed to be humbled and although I still don't believe His plan was for Karissa to be sick, He uses these moments to give us pause in our own plan and bring us back to relationship with Him.
Karissa is growing up now she's a 2 year old and has had several hospitalizations for seizures since. We have come to realize she is developmentally delayed due to having seizures and being on anti-seizure medications. She has a part of her brain (the temporal lobe) that is overactive and she still has some small petit mal seizures, but has thankfully not had any of the more dramatic partial complex seizures in almost 6 months. Adrianne at times feels overwhelmed with taking Karissa to physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, special education preschool classes and doctors appointments. It is tough right now but we are surviving.
I don't pretend to know everything in medicine. In my short career I've certainly made my share of mistakes, but I think I've also been taught a really important and practical lesson through all of this about being a good doctor. It kind of ties up the whole of my story in a nutshell. It happened a week ago I was talking to a man who was experiencing severe abdominal pain that had been worsening over about 3 months. He had so many tests to figure out what was wrong, but the specialists were unsure. We had a feeling it was cancer, but none of us knew for certain. He was having one more test that day which would be definitive and I could see he was angry and scared. The man was frustrated because he continued to be treated like he was seeking narcotic drugs, but his pain never got better. Drug seekers are like lepers in the medical community, they are considered unclean and treated like garbage. Jesus listened to these type of people and I made it a point that day to listen to his story. He had just adopted a 6 year old boy and was taking care of his elderly father who was the founder of the plastic company which my patient was now running. He said he wasn't afraid to die because he knew Jesus and he knew where he was going. But he was worried about his adopted son and his elderly father. He told me he didn't know how his business would survive if he died.
He was very proud of what he did and began to tell me that he once told his dad that he learned how to be good with making plastic from the movie Caddyshack. I promptly finished his sentence for him and said "Be the ball." The guy smiled and said "how did you know I was going to say that?" I caught myself tearing up (I do that a lot) and said, "because I play golf and I know Caddyshack. And besides in my business the most important lesson I've learned is to be a good doctor you have to 'be the patient'" With that the man cried and he thanked me and I gave him his pain medication.
He came back to see me yesterday. He wanted to let me know he has incurable stomach cancer. He has less than a year to live according to the specialist. I just sat and listened to him express his anger about why it took so long to find out. I don't have an answer. Medicine is a tough business. I just know that God is with me to fill the void of the tough spots and the anger and the frustration. I know that now.
