Acting Doctor

Credit: Prince George Speech Arts and Drama

The email started with “Congratulations” and then five minutes later I received a text that began with “Sorry to let you know that” The first was an educational/career opportunity, the second was a loss in the family. I felt alternating excitement and sadness and was reminded of an acting exercise I used to do with my students in which for ten seconds they had to pretend that their partner was their long lost twin, and then that their partner was an immediate physical threat. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that Theatre is about the extreme moments in life. Intense good or intense bad. There is not, to my knowledge, a play that has succeeded on the premise of brushing one’s teeth or sorting laundry. The moments we remember most in life also fall into one of those two categories. The Great. The Awful. And yet, what do we do when these happen so close to each other? To offer a medical example, how do I break the news to a patient that mom made it but baby didn’t, or the other way around. We talk a lot in medicine about breaking bad news, but what about breaking mixed news?

I think the answer may be found, in part,  back in the acting exercise. The exercise worked best when there was no hangover from the previous situation. When the actors inhabited the physical threat fully or the wonderful possibility of meeting a long lost twin fully. It worked, even if the switch was sudden. When faced with mixed news, I think we’re tempted to gloss over the part that makes us uncomfortable. We rush over the good news because we don’t want to seem insensitive or feel guilt about seemingly not empathizing with  the closely accompanying bad. Or we gloss over the bad because it’s hard and then strike a false cheeriness based on the good. The result is this emotional no man’s land in which we are not present because we are more concerned with what we ought to be feeling than what we are actually feeling. One of my favorite scriptures is “mourn with those who mourn” and “rejoice with those who rejoice”. There is no caveat for inconvenient timeframes or close proximity between events. All anyone expects or really needs whether it is a patient, friend, or a family member, is that you honor that particular moment, joy or pain, fully. Have you noticed how sweet the first laugh is after you have just talked about a tragic experience? We are most alive in those moments allowing for truer connection. And so, I will celebrate the good news in the first email and mourn with my family members for the bad news in the text that closely followed. May I honor both moments . . . .