A Doctor’s Story of Reconnecting to His Humanity

Good morning. I’m Tony. Um, I’m a surgeon. I’m an ear, nose, and throat surgeon.

Back in medical school, I had really good teachers, and they taught me that the most valuable tool I had in my toolbox was empathy, right? Feel what they’re feeling so that you can better guide them through the most difficult parts of their lives with emotional intelligence.

And I was really good at empathy. It came really naturally to me. Um, so naturally, in fact, that I made a promise to myself really early on to never, ever become numb to the pain that I was tasked to heal.

And then I saw death.

Again and again and again, in all of its forms. Sudden and tragic. Slow, painful, and tragic. Expected, quiet, and tragic. Bloody, violent, and tragic.

And the more I saw of it, the less tragic it became.

I mean, sure, the families were still wailing in agony or yelling in rage. But instead of feeling it right along with them, at some point I just stopped.

And I think it’s because death started to look different to me. It lost its mystique. It was no longer some boogeyman waiting in the wings.

It was actually really simple.

The lungs stop breathing. The heart stops beating. Blood vessels stop bringing oxygen to the organs, and without oxygen, the organs suffocate.

So death was nothing more than a series of mechanical failures.

And how do you mourn a failed machine?

You don’t.

So I didn’t.

I didn’t grieve. I didn’t mourn. I didn’t cry because of death for five years.

By the end of my training, I was pretty sure there was something wrong with me, because I could no longer connect with people when they needed me the most.

And I had this sinking feeling that the ability just wasn’t coming back. That I was going to be that much more disconnected and that much lonelier, all the time, every day, for the rest of my life.

Perks of saving lives, right?

Which brings me to my friend Zach.

Now, Zach was one of those great friends, one of those really special friends. We didn’t grow up together as kids. I met him in college. But we grew up together once we became adults.

And if you have friends like that, you know they’re really special.

Zach was loud and boisterous and just this force of nature. Like, if Zach called you, you picked up the phone.

So I didn’t even think about it when Zach called me one day and said, “Hey, come over to my house. I just want you to look at something.”

Zach had had a lump on the roof of his mouth for a few weeks. He went to the dentist, they did a CT scan, and Zach brought the scan home for me to look at.

Lumps and bumps of the head and neck, that’s my specialty.

So I scrolled through the scan, and I was sure about what I was seeing.

An aggressive, cancerous tumor.

And it wasn’t great.

I told Zach as much, and he said, “Okay. What’s the worst-case scenario?”

And I told him. Massive, disfiguring surgery. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Your life is going to drastically change.

Zach didn’t panic. He didn’t cry.

He said, “Okay, because it’s time to fight.”

And he made me promise one thing. As his doctor friend, always tell him the truth. Never sugarcoat anything.

I was able to honor that promise for all of 48 hours.

Then he sent me his diagnosis: adenoid cystic carcinoma of a minor salivary gland.

Again, this is my specialty. So this is a cancer I know like an old friend.

And this old friend is very stubborn.

You can cut it out. You can fry it with radiation. You can poison it with chemotherapy. You can eradicate every detectable trace of the cancer, and still, a handful of cells will hide on a nerve somewhere like they’re in a World War II bunker, just waiting for treatment to end so they can grow again.

And when it grows again, it is that much harder to treat.

So I knew the numbers.

With this type of cancer, in this location, at this stage, the most likely prognosis was that Zach would be dead within five years.

And I couldn’t tell him.

I couldn’t be the one to take hope away from him. And if he was going to be one of those rare few who made it through, hope was what he was going to need.

So I decided I was going to make it up to him by just being there for him throughout his entire treatment, whatever he needed.

And the treatment was rough.

It started with the casual brutality we call life-saving surgery. They removed half of his upper mouth and replaced it with a really fancy dental prosthetic with teeth. So he had to learn to chew and swallow again.

Then the radiation fried his throat tissue, so every time he swallowed, it burned terribly for months.

And chemotherapy just made him feel sick. It made him feel weak.

But he said he was going to fight.

And he fought.

He didn’t just fight against the pain and the physical changes. He fought for his humanity. He fought to remain who he had always been.

He adopted a puppy and raised it with his husband. He taught himself to sing again through false teeth.

When he was doing really well after treatment, we planned a trip. We were going to go to the Essence Festival in New Orleans and just celebrate how far he had come.

So hope was doing its work.

And then Zach called.

So, of course, I answered.

Something was wrong. He had been having pain in his back for a few days, and he woke up that morning unable to move his leg.

The cancer had made its way to his spine, and he needed emergency surgery to give him a chance of ever walking again.

So we repurposed our boys’ trip. Instead of partying in New Orleans, we had a much more subdued party in his hospital room in Houston.

Now, this trip was heavy.

Because the cancer hadn’t just come back. It had metastasized.

Remember, it started in his mouth. Now it was on his spinal cord. And the odds were that eventually it was going to make its way to his lungs.

So this wasn’t just some setback.

Death was coming.

And I was at the end of my medical expertise.

It left me feeling exposed because he didn’t need a doctor anymore. He needed his friend.

He needed empathy. He needed all those emotions that I had lost somewhere along the way and no longer had access to.

So on that flight down to Houston, I had two questions bouncing through my head the entire time.

What do I have left to give my friend that would have any meaning?

And what does it mean for me if I no longer have the capacity to feel grief this close to my heart?

After a couple of nights, I was alone with Zach in his hospital room. It was really late, and we had been talking and talking.

And then, suddenly, the question dawned on me. The question that my brutal training and my, you know, diminished humanity had left me uniquely equipped to ask.

“Do you want to talk about death?”

He couldn’t talk about it with his loved ones, his husband, his mother. The air was thick with prayer and hope and talk of miracles and all of that great, aspirational stuff.

But death was in the room.

I could feel it, and I had a feeling he could feel it too.

And he said, “Yeah. I really do.”

So we did.

You know, we talked about the mechanics. We talked about the shape death might take for him and how it might feel.

We talked about faith and how sometimes it brought him comfort, but a lot of the time it just left him wanting.

And we talked about the burdens he was ready to lay down.

He had been a father figure to his siblings and cousins for his entire life. And now, here at the end, all he wanted was for someone to take care of him, to love him, to hold him, and to tell him things were going to be okay.

The words just flowed out of him. It was like an avalanche.

And I think that freedom to speak came because, finally, nobody in that room feared death.

Death was just the next step.

It was just the next part of life.

So Zach died a few months later.

Just like I thought, the cancer went to his lungs.

Just another series of mechanical failures.

And when I heard the news, I was sad. But I didn’t feel it in my bones.

That disconnect felt disrespectful to his memory. And it also seemed to confirm that I had become something less than human.

So, in the church at his funeral, I realized that was maybe partially true.

I had changed.

But I wasn’t broken.

You know, empathy hadn’t just left. It was a choice I had made to protect myself.

And so it stood to reason that I could also choose to bring it back.

It wasn’t just going to find me anymore. That much had changed.

But I could go get it.

I could invite it in.

I just had to be intentional.

So I let it in.

I let in the sight of Zach embalmed in his coffin.

I let in the sound of all those agonized voices bouncing off the walls of the church.

I let in the feeling of my hand on my friend’s back as he shook and wept.

I just let it all in.

And I sank beneath it.

And then, thankfully, I cried.

I cried so hard for the first time in years and years and years.

So what would I like you to take away from this story?

Well, I know many of us in this room deal with death professionally. And that changes your relationship with death. It can change your relationship with yourself.

And it can feel like you’ve lost something.

But I want to tell you that you are not broken.

You have actually gained a gift.

And the gift is this choice you now have.

You can choose to bring death into the conversation. You can bring it into the room with you.

And it is so meaningful for people who are dying because they want to talk about it.

You can also choose to feel grief and anger. You can choose to feel your sadness and let it ground you in your humanity.

We are not broken.

We have been given the gift of this choice.

And we are so much better for it.

Thank you, guys.