To tell or not to tell: musings at knife-point

This morning I was at the UW hospital for a needed medical procedure. Obviously it’s not anything debilitating as I am home now blogging energetically.

But I once again confronted the following issue: should I tell the surgeon that, oh by the way, not only am I a lawyer, but I teach torts, which in common parlance is really the same as personal injury law and yes, we devote a good amount of time to medical malpractice?

The benefit of such a revelation: I am sending the message that if there is an iota of greater care that can be expanded, go ahead an expand it now, because I am one of those people who is very comfortable with the courtroom. But that seems rather selfish, doesn’t it? I do have strong communitarian principles engrained in me and these let me know that my medical care should be the same, not better not worse than that of the bloke next in line. Oh come on now, that’s great reasoning in the abstract, but as the surgical team is sharpening the blades, such good collectivist ideology quickly hides under the warm and cozy blanket.

The down side of disclosure: once I tell them I am a lawyer, I can never ever pinpoint them on anything. Questions such as “am I going to die tomorrow?” or "why are you sweating so much and taking four times as long as you had implied for this?" will no longer be answered. It’s too risky. What if they err in their judgment and I turn lawyer-nasty and cause them professional hardship? So they clam up.

Still, the blades are turning my way and in a moment of weakness I tell all.

Unanticipated consequence: this personal revelation cracks a barrier and the team turns chatty. So, the doc working the blades explains how he himself wanted to be a historian but he hated history grad school here at UW and oh, I also teach family law, do I? Why, his wife died young and he became a single father and so he knows what that’s all about and one son is now in Iraq serving in the Army and yes he WANTED to go there and incidentally have I heard of this lawyer he knows since yes, she does practice personal injury law, ha ha ha, some of his best friends are indeed personal injury lawyers… and so on. Whatever benefit I accrued from the “greater care given to the person who might sue,” I lost because he was now entirely focused on his own recollections.

And the technician was no better. Directing a machine, a teeny wrong movement of which could lead me to have permanently damaged vital organs, she informs me that her son is applying to Law School and could I speculate (how, please tell me? You are in my neck area, I dare not move for fear of being slashed in the wrong places) what his chances might be? He got this on his LSATs and that for his GPA, and he comes from a line of UW grads and then there's his sister…

I have always been told that there is something about me that makes people talk and tell their life’s story. I had, up until today, fancied that to be a talent of sorts. I believed that it was my gently persuasive and caring manner that instills trust and confidence. Now I know better. Today I did not cajole gently. I did not encourage this flood of story-telling at all. What they were obviously reacting to was this feature that I have: it is a Concerned Frown that I have had for years and years, which stays on my face no matter what, even if I am laughing with abandon: the Concerned Frown is always in place. Since the team was up there working in its vicinity, it is clearly what inspired the revelations. If you don’t buy it, please consider this:



Wouldn’t you spill your life’s story to a person who looked at you in this way? (I should note that The Concerned Frown was especially pronounced this morning because I was also quite concerned that they would all stray a bit and hit the wrong connective tissue and I would thereafter no longer be connected.)

A P.S. on our very fleeting interest in faraway places

In commenting on my Walesa post (Saturday, below), a very open minded reader writes the following: “I'm always very interested to hear perspectives on the fall of Communism from people who were on the receiving end.” She may be in the minority on this.

I have to say that mine was a strange personal history, since I criss-crossed the ocean too often to fully feel the impact of life under any system – capitalist, communist, or post-communist. My greatest emotional connection (to a country or a system) came during my adolescent years and all those were, indeed, spent in Warsaw (under communist governance). But I thought my 6 years of childhood in New York (during the 60s) were also significantly impressionable, especially as I experienced the American reaction to me (and to my family) at the time.

We were an anomaly in those years. Tourism between Poland and the US came to an almost complete halt after the war, since the US would not grant visas to Poles who hadn’t a plausible connection to someone in the States who could vouch for their financial solvency (and Americans were fearful of traveling to a country “behind an iron curtain,” as if, indeed, there was a real curtain and Poles held the key, to be used randomly for locking in visitors from the West). Of course, there always was that trickle of Polish immigrants, but we weren’t like them: we were regarded with suspicion because we weren’t seeking asylum. We intended to go back to Poland after my father’s work at the UN was finished. Why would anyone want to return to a country like Poland --was so often the unspoken question.

Or spoken. Because I did get this query upon occasion. The antipathy here toward all things associated with communism or socialism was unbelievable. Even at the UN school, of all places, I remember a classmate asking my teacher: “why do people hate communists?” and the teacher answering “how would you like it someone took away all your money?” Those were interesting times.

The end of Communist Party rule in Poland is a welcome relief, of course, greeted there with euphoria and incredible optimism (tainted now by the 20% - 25% unemployment rate and the collapse of the welfare safety nets, though flickering again with Poland’s entry into the EU). The sense of relief on this side of the ocean is palpable as well. Not so much because we (I speak now as an American – I flip flop in this way constantly) have such great empathy for the political climate of insignificant small states far far away, but because the imaginary threat they once posed has suddenly vanished and they again can become insignificant and irrelevant, while we focus our attention and interest on places that have greater economic linkages to us here.

The one final comment I have for now is that I think Americans would be surprised at the great love that Poles have always felt for this country, regardless of its political make up du jour, regardless of the on again off again interest that Americans have in Poland’s future. In this sense Lech Walesa was absolutely correct: Poles loved Reagan because for a moment, Reagan made them feel that the love affair was not one-sided. Few presidents before or after have given Poland and Eastern Europe more than a second glance.

Meet the flake

There are few events that tug at me more than “meet the author” gigs and book-signings. It’s not the signature-in-text per se, it’s the little talk that precedes it, where the authors comment on their ‘creative process,’ recall a little anecdote maybe, and read a bit from their most recent volume. I have been to quite a number of these around town and each has been good, even when the audience has been small and I could see the embarrassment and disappointment on the writer’s face: travel all this way for 5 people?? -must be every author’s nightmare to draw really small crowds.

I was looking forward to tonight’s reading/signing at Borders. I’d even bought a copy of an earlier book by this guy. I was psyched. A friend who’d accompanied me to a couple of other readings in the past was going to meet me there earlier so that we could stake out seats, just in case it was packed.

Of course, I got off to a late start and so I careened to Borders at the speed of a maniac, arriving just seconds before 7. I noted that the parking lot was not overflowing and I was glad, therefore, to be adding my body to the possibly emptyish signing, though I was surprised at a low turn out since the author had been a National Book Award Finalist. These kinds of honors usually bring out the celebrity-seeking types. Not me, I thought, I applaud even the unheralded authors. I’m all about giving praise to anyone who manages to spit out a final draft, send off the completed manuscript for publication and then get an invitation to talk about it all at Borders.

Inside, all was quiet. No friend. No author. At the information desk I am reminded that today is NOT June 12. That was yesterday. So was the book signing.

[The sad thing is that I must have 'flake' spelled out on my forehead these days, so that my friend was not even surprised yesterday when I did not show up. It’s as if one can’t expect better of me, as if asking me to keep a calendar straight is laughable, as if I belong to the tormented, harrowed sort that cannot even show up anymore at the right time or the right place.]

I couldn’t get myself to ask if the signing had been well attended: a ‘yes’ would have filled me with regret, a ‘no’ would have filled me with shame.