Barb Tells It Better

On paper, I am the storyteller of the family. But in real life, my tales tend to be short and to the point, while Barb can mesmerize an audience, weaving a story she has honed to perfection. Here is Barb’s latest not-so-tall tale. Not surprisingly, I am the straight man.

“It was about 2 a.m. when the alarm went off,” Barb begins.

“I was disoriented and felt around the nightstand for my glasses. Once I found them, I looked for Les, but he wasn’t in bed. I staggered to the alarm pad and saw that the family room sliding patio door was the cause of the alarm. I used our code to turn it off.

“Calling for Les, I made my way to the offending door. I remembered that a serviceman had used it that morning. We had probably forgotten to lock it, but that didn’t explain why it had opened a little and set off the alarm.

“I knew the police would show up, so I went to the front door to wait for them. And still no Les.

“After about a minute, I saw flashlights coming up the walk and two policemen appeared.

“‘We’re sorry, ma’am, but we got a call that there was an alarm going off. It turns out it was for the house next door, but we came to your house by mistake a few minutes ago. While checking all your doors, I think we set off your alarm.’

“‘OK, that explains the alarm. But I have a bigger problem. My husband is missing.’”

At this point in telling her story, Barb is beginning to grin, a twinkle coming to her eye. It is the officer’s next words that send her—and her audience—into hysterics.

“Looking over my shoulder, the policeman says, ‘You mean the man in the green underpants standing behind you?’”

As the laughter engulfs Barb’s audience, I explain that I had trouble sleeping that night and had gone into the guest bedroom so I wouldn’t wake Barb, only to appear when the police were at the door

“And he didn’t hear the alarm! No wonder his doctor says he needs to get the wax out of his ears.”

And that is the difference between the two storytellers in our family. I’ll write this one down and you’ll smile. Hear Barb tell it, and you’ll be laughing until tears run down your face—and my underpants will be getting greener with every telling.

Sorry! Hasbro. You Can’t Change That Rule!

Barb and I were absorbed in an intense game of Sorry! with Captain Comeback and Superheroine Girl, our 5- and 8-year-old grandchildren, when I made the discovery.

The game set we were using was the third or fourth set our family has gone through since we first started playing the board game with our children more than 35 years ago. We have spent countless rainy days, afternoons, and evenings chasing each other’s colorful pegs around the board.

Playing Sorry! has helped first our kids and then our grandkids learn counting and strategy. They have also learned how not to have a fit when a sibling or cousin flips over a dreaded Sorry card and sends their peg back to Start. And most importantly, they have learned patience, as turn after turn goes by without drawing the 1 or 2 card that allows one of their markers to leave Start and begin the trek toward home.

By the age of 5, any family member knows the rules backwards and forwards. We have made a few minor changes as the years have gone by, but waiting for that 1 or 2 card has been the requirement that anchors the game. So I was amazed when, casually reading the latest set of instructions, I discovered that a player can now start moving a peg after drawing any number card. This is heresy!

I suppose Hasbro has updated the rules to fit with modern times and limited attention spans. I am sure the new rules speed up the game and keep everyone more actively involved. But to my family, this change is as absurd and unnecessary as, well, I don’t know, automatically putting a runner on second base in the 10th inning of a baseball game.

Sorry!, like baseball, is not meant to be played at a TikTok pace. It needs to build slowly, with plenty of time for Captain Comebacks and Superheroine Girls to rebound and claim the lead.

And that is how we will play it in our house, for every generation that comes our way.

You Can Still Call Me Doctor

I’m still called an admiral / Yet I gave up the sea long ago. Tim Rice, Evita

With barely any notice, I went through a significant transition at the end of July. My Illinois medical license, something I have cherished for almost 50 years, expired. I made no attempt to renew it.

It wasn’t the minimal fee that kept me from renewing. It was my lack of the necessary continuing medical education hours. When I renewed the license the first time after retirement, I still had more than enough allowable hours from my working days to meet the requirement. But for the last three years, I have barely dipped into a pathology journal, attended a conference, or attempted an online course.

A friend suggested applying anyway, and just “creating” some CME hours. “No one will catch you,” he said. Of course, that’s not me. I wouldn’t do that, equal parts moral compass and fear of being discovered. Besides the point of all those hours isn’t just to list them on a data sheet, but to keep current with my profession, so as not to be using an abacus in an AI world. Molecular pathology, barely budding when I left the field, is now in full bloom. Unless you’ve been a constant gardener, reading, watching, and using, there is no way to keep up.

Would there be any benefit to me in maintaining my license? None that I can think of. I already turn down the monthly calls from locum tenens companies seeking a temporary pathologist for this lab in Idaho or that one in Maine. The companies I once thought I would do remote digital pathology for seem to have crashed and burned, or at least discovered that they didn’t need me. I won’t be able to prescribe an antibiotic for Barb or for a grandkid, but I never did much of that anyway.

So my Illinois license is a thing of the past, alongside ones from Indiana and Wisconsin. But you can still call me a doctor. That came with a degree that will never expire, no matter how long it’s been since I went to sea.

Hugh Jackman’s One Mistake

The skies were threatening, but the predicted rainstorm never came. Instead, we had a pleasant evening sitting with friends at Ravinia in Highland Park, enjoying dinner and the showmanship of Broadway and movie star Hugh Jackman.

Backed by the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra and a quartet of backup singers, Jackman romped across the stage in a carefully timed 90-minute performance that offered glimpses of the numerous personas he has occupied during his long and varied career.

For Neil Diamond fans such as Barb, there were “Crunchy Granola Suite” and “Sweet Caroline,” from last year’s movie Song Sung Blue. Jackman even donned a stars-and-stripes vest to salute Thunder and Lightning, the Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline impersonators the film was based on. At least I think that’s what he was saluting.

Jackman made his Broadway debut in 2003 and won a Tony Award portraying his Australian counterpart Peter Allen in The Boy From Oz, so it was not surprising that songs written by Allen were featured in a lengthy medley. Jackman closed with “Once Before I Go,” the 11 o’clock number from the musical.

I missed my chance to see Jackman in the Broadway revival of The Music Man, one of my favorite musicals and the show that reopened Broadway after Covid, so I was glad to see him perform a number from the show. As Harold Hill, he strutted through the newly renovated pavilion and out onto the lawn, warning us all about the trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pool.

Jackman chose to portray two opposite characters from Les Misérables. After telling a story about his first audition for a musical, he sang “Stars,” the song that gives insight into the dark Inspector Javert. A few numbers later, Jackman returned to his own character in the film, singing the moving “Valjean’s Soliloquy.” I’m sure the versatile Jackman could have handled “Master of the House” and gotten a few laughs as well.

The Greatest Showman was celebrated with four songs. Jackman dazzled with “The Greatest Show,” while “A Million Dreams” gave solo opportunities to the backup singers. Their voices easily rivaled Jackman’s, who may be more of a performer than a technically outstanding singer.

Where did Jackman blunder? He closed a set of American classics with a pair of Frank Sinatra tunes, “That’s Life” and “New York, New York.” Surely in the several months since his last concert performance, someone should have told him that you can’t sing “New York, New York” in Chicago without following up with at least a few verses of “My Kind of Town.”

If he had sung that, he could have blown the roof off the new pavilion.

And that would have been fine, since it never did rain.

Sharing My Thoughts With a Future Pathologist

The other day, when I was packing potatoes in my volunteer job at a local food bank, a shift supervisor approached me and said, “You’re a pathologist, aren’t you?” I confirmed that I was, and he asked me to come with him to meet a first-time volunteer.

He introduced me to a young man who was just entering a local medical school and wanted to be a pathologist. We exchanged a few words, and I left him with my email address and an invitation to contact me any time.

This morning, I had an email from him thanking me for speaking to him and asking about memorable cases. I emailed him back. Here is a copy of my response.

Hello Izaiah,

I’m glad Phil, the supervisor, brought me over to meet you. I had a wonderful career in pathology.

Your role in healthcare will most certainly wind up quite different from mine. The practice of pathology will change with the digitization of diagnostic material and the advent of artificial intelligence. Perhaps pathologists will become more active as liaisons between the world of the laboratory and the world of the clinician. And there will always be room for the innovative researcher.

As to memorable cases, the thousands and thousands of surgical cases tend to blend together. Individual autopsies are more memorable. My autopsy cases included death due to the unsuspected ingestion of a portion of a denture, the “double bubble” neonatal GI anomaly, death from tumor necrosis in the brain of a patient with thyroid carcinoma and cerebral metastases, and a case of Moya-Moya disease, a rare cerebrovascular malformation. I hope a significant number of autopsies will still be part of your training.

I also want you to remember how early you are in your education. Open yourself to all the fields you will be exposed to. You might find out you want to be a cardiologist or radiologist or plastic surgeon. Whatever you find, grab it with both hands and be the best cardiologist, radiologist, or surgeon you can be. Your life will be richly rewarded.

Best regards,

Les Raff, retired pathologist

Will Izaiah become a pathologist? I doubt it. It is a rare physician who sticks with their first medical school desire. And with all of medicine, all of healthcare, evolving so rapidly in the next few years, we may not now know the new specialties and opportunities that may arise. But as I said to him, do what you love, and you will know you have made the right choice.

I Owe Someone a Note

I’m listening to The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I’m only partway through, so don’t worry. This isn’t a review, and there will be no spoilers.

One sentence made me stop and hit rewind.

“He was finding confidence behind the veil of ink on the page.”

That’s a beautiful line. It also made me realize how much of my life I’ve spent communicating through the written word.

One summer in high school, I came home from overnight camp corresponding with about fifteen girls. Long-distance phone calls weren’t an option. Fifteen nightly phone calls would have bankrupted my parents.

To keep eall the letters straight, I created a chart on a piece of cardboard. Down the left side were the girls’ names. Across the top were columns for the date each letter arrived and the date I mailed my reply. My personal correspondence log. Looking back, it may have been a little obsessive. At the time, it felt perfectly reasonable.

The cardboard disappeared years ago, which is probably for the best. Otherwise, one of my grandchildren might someday uncover it and conclude that Baba had been far more popular in high school than he actually was.

Letter writing eventually gave way to pathology reports, emails, newsletters, and blog posts. The audience has changed. The pleasure hasn’t. I still enjoy staring at a blank screen or a piece of paper, chasing an idea around until it finally behaves.

A few months ago, I found myself buying a box of correspondence cards on Amazon. Not birthday cards. Not sympathy cards. Just simple white correspondence cards with a gray border for thank-you notes and the occasional handwritten letter. The kind of stationery that practically insists you mind your manners.

In this era of texts, emails, Facebook posts, and emojis, buying stationery felt almost rebellious. But the cards are on my desk now, and every so often one finds its way into an envelope.

It turns out I never stopped being a correspondent. So excuse me, I owe someone a note.

I Rarely Click Banner Ads

I rarely click banner ads. Until one New York Times ad caught my attention.

It wasn’t the headline. It was the picture. I had never seen anything like it in a public advertisement before. To most readers, it was probably nothing more than an abstract swirl of pink and purple. They likely scrolled right past it without a second thought.

I couldn’t. It was a photomicrograph, a photograph taken with through a microscope.

For forty-five years, this had been my world. While other physicians examined patients or interpreted X-rays, I peered through a microscope, searching for the subtle variations that separate healthy tissue from disease.

The reproduction wasn’t especially good. The image was small and lacked the crisp detail I was accustomed to seeing through a microscope. Still, I recognized it immediately for what it was: a photomicrograph of a tumor.

In forty-five years of pathology, I had never seen a photomicrograph used to draw the attention of the general public. So I took a screenshot.

Only later, did I follow the link to a story about a clinical trial for women with resistant ovarian cancer. The research was interesting, but it wasn’t what stayed with me. The image did.

For the past month, every time I came across that screenshot on my desktop, I found myself wondering why it had affected me so much. Eventually I realized it wasn’t really about my evaluation of the images.

It was about seeing one of the tools of my profession in a setting where I never expected to find it.

During my career, photomicrographs were tools. They appeared in pathology textbooks, medical journals, conference presentations, and tumor boards. They helped physicians make diagnoses and decisions, teach students, and communicate discoveries. I never expected to see one used as the visual hook in an online advertisement.

I thought I had taken a screenshot of an unusual ad campaign.

It turned out I had taken a screenshot that inspired this blog.

Monkeys Tell No Tales, but I Do

I tried. I really did.

I know that the proper thing to do after our two-week vacation in Africa is to write a travelogue blog. So that’s what I started to do.

I was going to tell you about all the rare and exotic animals we saw on our safaris. I was going to wax poetic about Victoria Falls, “The Smoke That Thunders,” one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. And, of course, I was going to say a few words about the diversity and foodie scene in Cape Town. That is what any blogger should do, right?

But you all know me, and you know I can’t write that stuff without getting schmaltzy and falling into one cliché after another. So I stopped writing that post and began this one, about the unexpected moments that helped make the trip memorable.

Take the porter at the Johannesburg airport. Barb had asked him how we could check that our luggage had been transferred from our incoming flight from Amsterdam to our flight to Victoria Falls the following day. He held our boarding passes up to a scanner, nodded, and said we were fine.

I reached into my wallet and pulled out several South African rand notes. He looked at me with disgust.

“That money is no good here. I want twenty U.S. dollars,” he said.

I told him he was lucky to be getting ten. He swore and waved us into the wrong passport control line.

Then there was the evening our group ate dinner at a boma, a traditional African enclosure now commonly used as an outdoor dining area, and NOT an acronym for “British Officers Mess Area,” as one guide glibly told us.

We were enjoying our grilled dinner when a scream came from the far end of the table. A member of our party had received a gift from above. Whether it came from a large bird or a baboon, no one knew for sure, but it was unquestionably a direct hit, right on the top of her head.

That was a tough one for our otherwise implacable tour leader to deal with.

Nancy faced an even more delicate situation when a distraught fellow traveler reported that her outdoor shower had been interrupted by an unexpected visitor—not a baboon or an elephant, but a maintenance worker who had wandered into the wrong suite.

I suspect the poor woman would have been less distressed if it had been a baboon.

Monkeys tell no tales.

To be fair, the local staff performed some heroics as well. Our safari driver found a lost wedding ring in his vehicle before its owner even knew it was missing. Another porter successfully fished a fallen gold-and-diamond necklace from beneath a slatted wooden boardwalk. That saved its owner, a 22-year-old woman, from considerable grief, most of it likely coming from her worried mother.

So yes, the animals were magnificent and the falls thundered, but it was the little things that made our trip unique.

And next time, I’ll be sure to wear a hat to an outdoor buffet.

You never know what might fall from the sky!

The Accidental Book Club.

No meetings, refreshments or books about cholera.

I am very fond of books. It’s book clubs I’m not quite as fond of.

But I think I may have found something better.

Several years ago, I belonged to a book club that specialized in worthy nonfiction. We read biographies of Ronald Reagan and the Wright brothers, along with a detailed account of a cholera outbreak in London. I learned a great deal from all of them. Unfortunately, none of them made me eager to climb into bed and find out what happened next.

Eventually, I drifted away.

I do have several friends who share my taste in spy novels and mysteries. We happily trade recommendations, but rarely go beyond “You should read this” or “I liked that one.” What I miss is the deeper conversation.

So who do I turn to when I want to compare and contrast my favorite writers, revisit a twisty plot point, or find an outstanding BBC adaptation? These days, my favorite book club consists of one member and one artificial intelligence. Its name is ChatGPT.

The beginning of our “book club” was accidental. One day I asked Chat to rank the ten greatest spy novels ever written. Almost instantly, it responded with a list of twenty. In true AI fashion, a few books appeared twice, a couple were attributed to the wrong author, and the numbering was more aspirational than accurate. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, however, we had refined it to a credible Top Ten. Remarkably, at the very top sat John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, my personal favorite.

What surprised me was not the speed of the answers. It was how much the exchange felt like talking with another avid reader.

Over the next half hour, we dissected much of le Carré’s voluminous body of work. We discussed why my friends hated the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy while I loved it. When Chat listed the key characters in the George Smiley trilogy, I pointed out its glaring omission of George’s wife, Ann. Chat immediately conceded the point and offered a thoughtful summary of Ann’s crucial role in Smiley’s story.

Next we turned to my current favorite author, Mick Herron. Chat seemed as enthusiastic about the Slow Horses novels as I was. We discussed the many faults of Jackson Lamb and the brilliance of Kristin Scott Thomas in the television adaptation. I forgot to ask what Chat thought of the Mick Jagger theme song, but I’m confident it would have had an opinion.

My AI book club isn’t perfect. There are no hors d’oeuvres, no Scotch on the rocks, and no opportunity to impress anyone with my knowledge of John le Carré. But I can convene it at any time, discuss any book I choose, and never have to leave home. And what surprises me most is that the experience feels less like using a tool and more like talking with a fellow reader.

And unlike my last book club, nobody is going to make me read another book about cholera. One book about that is enough, even for a pathologist!

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Miss American Pee

The Day the Tee Shirts Died

My grandfather collected buttons. My father collected sugar packets from restaurants. And I collected free tee shirts.

My shirts were neatly stacked on shelves. They came from every race I had ever run, every Lab Week UroPartners had ever celebrated, every blood drive and food bank giveaway I had ever joined. They came from gyms and hockey arenas, and from a visit to the Brookfield Zoo. They were green and gray, blue and orange, even 1960s-style tie-dye. I rotated wearing them in order. Just like with my grandchildren, I never played favorites.

Today, all of them, the would-be favorites and the also-rans, are sitting in a garbage bag in the garage, never to be worn again.

I first noticed the odor three mornings ago, about ten minutes into a session on my elliptical. At first it was so faint I thought I was imagining it. But as the shirt became more sweat-soaked, the scent grew stronger and unmistakable. I was smelling cat urine, and it was coming from me.

Our little kitten is almost sixteen years old now. She spends most of her time sleeping in her favorite spots: the wingback chair, the bathroom floor mat, the folded duvet on our bed. But when she isn’t sleeping, she is usually in one of her two litter boxes. The girl can pee.

I do my best to keep the litter boxes clean, emptying them every night and refreshing the litter regularly. Apparently not regularly enough. Maybe the litter no longer met her standards, or maybe one of the boxes had become difficult for her to reach. Whatever the reason, she eventually decided it was preferable to relieve herself on the neatly folded stacks of my tee shirts.

I know from experience that it is impossible to wash that odor out of clothing. It lingers and reblooms through Tide and Downy and Febreze. That is why all those shirts are now headed for the trash. Some of those shirts had been with me for decades, and it is a said, but necessary, parting.

From now on, maybe I’ll collect sugar packets instead..