Meet René. She gave me a letter to read to physicians when I spoke last week at the Oklahoma Osteopathic Association. (Listen to keynote here). Here’s what I shared from this courageous woman with a wise message for us all. My talk was dedicated to her father, Jerry E, King, MD, and all the medical students and physicians who lost their lives to suicide in the pursuit of helping and healing others. See Oklahoma doctor suicides—13 reasons why.
I have a letter from Jerry’s daughter I’m going to read. Here’s his daughter in his arms after her birth, his daughter hugging him as a toddler. And there we’ve got her at 14 years old. This is a letter from her. She’s in her 50s now. She wants me to read this to you.
“My father was from a poor family in Oklahoma and the first to go to college. He father didn’t even make it to high school. Dad graduated from the University of Oklahoma Medical School and became an anesthesiologist in 1964. He was on the first team to successfully reattach an amputated arm. The surgery went so well that the patient became a pottery artist. I have one of the pieces in my home. Unfortunately, during that time that he went through residency, it was not uncommon [as I know many of you recall] for drug companies to send samples to med students, residents and doctors. It was at that time that my father became addicted to uppers and downers in order to make it through the long hours. In his mind, the drugs helped him accomplish his dream. But in the end, they also took it away. Many times over his career, he was caught using drugs, and his fellow doctors and the administrators would hush it up and move him to another town in another hospital out of some twisted combination of loyalty and shame.
Thing was, my father was excellent at what he did, a gifted physician, wonderful teacher. Hospitals and universities were glad to have him at first. And then the meds would start missing, and patients that needn’t had died, did. After he got caught in Lexington at Saint Joseph’s hospital, while he taught at the University of Kentucky, they took away his drug license. He then found a job in Harlan Country, Kentucky at the Harlan Appalachian Hospital, where somehow he was able to not only teach but once again be in surgery. Don’t ask me how they allowed an anesthesiologist without a drug license to be involved in surgeries, but they did for a year. But this time when he got caught after meds were missing, and a woman died, he was told that they would have his medical license pulled. He went into work that Sunday morning and, according to the coroner, went into the surgical dressing room and shot himself up with enough medication to kill 20 men his size. One of his students found him. I still remember them coming to my house.”
She was 14 at the time. See the picture of her? That’s how old she was when this all took place, okay? So just listen to what this child went through. And we (the medical profession) have set this situation up this way so that she had to go through this. René explains that they came to her house. She said she can’t ever forget this moment. They lived up on a hill. It’s impossible to get there. When there are five cars in the driveway (only two fit in the driveway and three are on the lawn) and there’s all male doctors in the house and administrators surrounding her mom when René walked into her house. The first thing her mother said, “Well at least we have the memories.”
“My mother, who had been an active alcoholic for a number of years, was incapacitated and had no memory for six months. At 14 I had to notify my grandmother in Oklahoma of her son’s death and arrange my father’s funeral. I still have the canceled checks, where the local banker, who knew the situation, allowed me to sign in my childish scrawl the check for my father’s casket. Chemical dependency among medical personnel has to be addressed, whether it is the stress of the addiction or the repercussions of the addiction, patient deaths, loss of family, loss of license, law suits. Chemical dependency plays a serious part in physician suicide. If we don’t better communicate the issues of chemical dependency with premed students and rid the profession of the enabling of fellow staff and administrators and eradicate the shame of dealing with addiction, we will continue to lose patients and medical personnel. I know all too well how deadly that silence can be.”
