The Quiet Work of Clarity: Seeing Into the Future at the End of Life

Listen to JCO's Art of Oncology article, "The Quiet Work of Clarity” by Dr. Henry Bair, who is an ophthalmology resident physician at Wills Eye Hospital. The article is followed by an interview with Bair and host Dr. Mikkael Sekeres. Dr. Bair explores how vision care can honor end-of-life goals and helps a patient with failing sight write to his children.

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: The Quiet Work of Clarity, Henry, Bair, MD 

Mikkael Sekeres: Welcome back to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. This ASCO podcast features intimate narratives and perspectives from authors exploring their experiences in oncology. I'm your host, Mikkael Sekeres. I'm professor of medicine and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami.

What a pleasure it is to have joining us today Dr. Henry Bair, an ophthalmology resident physician at Wills Eye Hospital, to discuss his Journal of Clinical Oncology Art of Oncology article, "Quiet Work of Clarity".

At the time of this recording, our guest has no disclosures.

Dr. Bair and I have agreed to call each other by first names.

Henry, thank you for contributing to the Journal of Clinical Oncology and for joining us to discuss your article.

Henry Bair: Thank you very much for having me.

Mikkael Sekeres: I love starting off by getting a little bit of background about our guests. I know a little bit about you, but I'm not sure all of our listeners do. Can you tell us about yourself and how you reached this stage of your training?

Henry Bair: Sure thing. Happy to start there. I was born and raised in Taiwan. I came to the United States when I was 18 for college. I was at Rice University. I was drawn to it because the Texas Medical Center was right over there, but the university had a small liberal arts feel and the university did not box me into any specific discipline. I went there and we didn't have to declare anything and we could take any class from any school over there. And I actually fell in love with medieval studies of all things. I just came upon it in one of the survey courses and I went deeper and deeper and deeper and eventually wrote my thesis on medieval Irish manuscripts.

That was really interesting. At the same time I was doing some clinical work and I realized that medicine might be a way to combine my interest in storytelling and the humanities with making a tangible difference in people's lives. Then I was in medical school at Stanford University, which was, in a similar way, I found a place that really let me explore what it meant to be a physician because the medical school let me take classes from all across the university: so the law school, the school of humanities, school of engineering, the business school. I got a chance to do a little bit of a lot of different things to try to figure out what I actually wanted to do with life. And I spent a lot of time actually doing a little bit of palliative care, a little bit of oncology, some medical education, some medical humanities.

I had a lot of time thinking about, “Okay, what kind of specialty do I want to do?” I found myself really enjoying procedural specialties, but also really liking the kinds of patient interactions and conversations I had in palliative care and oncology, and eventually found ophthalmology, interestingly. I often have to remind myself or explain myself how those two connect. And to me, the way they connect is that ophthalmology lets me do very fascinating, intellectually challenging things in terms of working with my hands, very rewarding surgical procedural work. But at the same time, the conversations that I get to have with patients about seeing well, I saw so many parallels between that and living well. To me it was so much about quality of life. And that's how I knew that ophthalmology was the right move for me. And so now I'm an ophthalmology resident.

Mikkael Sekeres: Fascinating. When I was an undergrad, the person who had the most influence on me was an English professor who was also a medievalist. There must be something about the personality and pouring over these old texts and trying to read things in Middle English that appeals to some character trait in those of us who eventually become physicians. I also remember when I was in medical school, we could also take classes throughout the university. So I wound up taking some writing classes with undergrads and with graduate students. It adds to this holistic education that we bring to medicine because it's not all about the science, is it?

Henry Bair: Yeah, it's also different ways of thinking and seeing the world and just hearing people's different stories. It's the people I've met in a lot of those different settings outside of medical school that I think really enhanced my formative years in medical education.

Mikkael Sekeres: You certainly bring it all together in this essay, which was just lovely. And I wonder if we could dive into some of the aspects of this essay. I'm dying to know, when you went to see this man, the main character of your essay, did you have any idea what the consult would be about?

Henry Bair: No. So when we're in the hospital and as the ophthalmology resident on consult, we get notifications. These pop up whenever a primary team puts in a consult and it's usually fairly vague. It's usually no more than "blurry vision, please evaluate," "eye pain, please evaluate." As an ophthalmologist, getting a consult for blurry vision is kind of like a cardiologist getting consulted for chest pain. You're like, “Okay, but it could be something, it could be nothing, it could be something terrifying, it could be dry eyes, or it could be end-stage glaucoma, or it could be, who knows?” You really genuinely never know what you're getting yourself into until you actually go in there and talk to the patient, which can be frustrating, but also kind of an interesting experience.

Mikkael Sekeres: I worry I'm guilty of submitting some of those consults to ophthalmology.

Henry Bair: I didn't realize this fully until I started working on the ophthalmology side. I think non-ophthalmologists get so little exposure and training in ophthalmology. Of course, when I think about it, I didn't get any ophthalmology in medical school. So it's understandable.

Mikkael Sekeres: In your essay, you write, and I'm going to quote you to you, "I am still learning what we can treat and what we can only tend. My training has taught me well how to assess visual acuity, intraocular pressures, and retinal nerve fiber layer thickness, but standing at his bedside, the index that mattered was none of these, but whether we could help him read for one more day." “What we can treat and what we can only tend.” That's such a beautiful line. Is that something that only comes with years of experience, determining what we can treat and what we can only tend, or is it a dawning sense as we get to know our patients when we are trying to stop the inevitable from happening?

Henry Bair: That is an interesting question because I think of it more almost as a fundamental shift in mindset. And I'm coming from someone who I think had the benefit of having had mentors, having had clinical experiences in palliative care in medical school. As I mentioned earlier, I was drawn to a lot of those patient conversations. So I think in some ways, starting in residency, I had long been primed to think about tending to a patient's concerns. And yet, even having been primed, even having the benefit of all those experiences and those conversations with amazing clinicians and with patients, maybe it's subject matter specific. I mean, ophthalmology tends to be a specialty, in my experience, my limited experience, ophthalmology tends to be one of those specialties that focuses so much on fixing things and treating things and reversing things. And in fact, that's one of the beautiful things of ophthalmology: how often you can reverse things or completely stop the progression of disease.

And so I think in some ways, I am having to relearn what it means to see something not always as, “Okay, what's a problem here? What is the fix? How do I reverse this?” and go back and reach back to those experiences, those conversations I had with patients about trying to figure out, “Okay, the things that we can't fix, what can we still do?” To most people who have come across palliative care, this sentiment is by no means novel, the sentiment that there is always something we can do. You often hear about people talking about, “Oh, there's nothing more we can do.” And I sort of try to bring that approach into the clinical encounters that I have. It's very reflexive to think that, “Okay, a person has lost vision from end-stage glaucoma or they have a blind painful eye. Well, there's nothing more we can do. You know, we've done all the conventional surgeries, we've done all the therapies, the medications,” but I always have to pull myself back and say, “But there's always something we can do here.”

Mikkael Sekeres: It's so interesting how you frame that. We're problem solvers. We're trained to solve problems. A patient presents with X, a problem, we have to be clever enough to figure out how to solve it. I wonder if what you're saying indirectly is sometimes we're identifying the wrong problem.

Henry Bair: I think so, yeah.

Mikkael Sekeres: There may be a problem that we can't solve. Someone is actively dying from cancer. We can't solve the problem of curing them of their cancer. But there are other problems that we can potentially solve, and maybe that's where we have to be clever in identifying the problem.

Henry Bair: I think so. And it's also what's in our textbooks and what's not. So we spend hundreds of hours in lecture and we pour over so many textbooks, and I do question banks now for board exams preparation. It's all on the textbook presentations, the textbook solutions. The problems are, you know, the retinal artery occlusions, it's about the really bad diabetic retinopathy. And then the answers to those things would be a stroke workup, would be some kind of injection into the eye. But like the problem that I encountered in this story that I talked about was this patient trying to write letters to his kids. That's not going to show up on any exam. We don't have lectures about talking about those things.

Mikkael Sekeres: So, as I think you know, I wrote an essay in 2010 for Art of Oncology and for a book that I wrote about a woman who inspired me to go into oncology. She was a woman in her 40s who was a pediatric attending who had advanced ovarian cancer. The story I wrote about her was how she spent her final night on this earth in the intensive care unit writing cards for her children, too. It's fascinating how history repeats itself in how we care for people who have cancer. You have a really a beautiful way of saying this. You talk about, “an ordinary father sharing ordinary advice for an ordinary day. Illness had made that ordinariness remarkable. Our work that day was to protect the ordinary.” Can you talk a little bit, I mean given the woman I wrote about and the man you wrote about, about this need to communicate with your family after you're gone?

Henry Bair: To me, one of the biggest lessons I've learned working in healthcare is that what defines most of our lives, what defines the most meaningful, the most purposeful, the most rewarding aspects of our lives is our relationships. You can explore this from myriad perspectives. You can explore this from like a psychosocial perspective and look at all those studies showing that people who have better social connections and better ties with their families live longer lives and actually healthier lives, have decreased rates of mental health problems. Or we can just approach this from like a more humanistic perspective and explore it and think and listen in on the conversations people have with people around them, that patients have, the conversations patients have during the most difficult times of their lives. They don't talk about their work, they don't talk about their accomplishments, they talk about their relationships with their kids, with their spouses, with their parents.

In my experience when people are at critical junctures of big life changes, whether it's people about to go into major surgery, people grappling with the idea of losing their vision or losing their lives, any sort of big pivotal change, they want to talk to their families and explore gratitude and regret and all these things. These are the themes that come up over and over and over again. In some ways it does not surprise me at all, this need to communicate with the family at the end of life. In some ways that's how you live on, that's how we feel, that's how patients feel their lives are defined by is that lasting relationship, that lasting impact at the end, or even transcending the end.

Mikkael Sekeres: This is going beyond the end, isn't it?

Henry Bair: Yeah.

Mikkael Sekeres: These are letters and notes being written to children to be handed to them after death. And I think one of the reasons, in my case, the woman I encountered when I was in training who inspired me to go into oncology, I've been thinking about her for 25 years off and on. Both the incredible spirit to be able to do that on your last night on this earth, but also the flip side to it: there are potential downsides to doing this, aren't there? That, you know, I think about it from the perspective of her kids who at the time were 8 and 10 years old in my case. And I wonder what it was like for them to open up that birthday card when they were 17 or 18. And I wonder if you've kind of wondered the same about your patient and his children.

Henry Bair: Yeah, I think when we think about these letter-writing projects, legacy-type projects, I hear about in hospitals around the country, there are teams that try to implement legacy-type things: whether it's doing video messages, whether it's stitching together short documentary film for patients who are in hospice. I feel like I see these things popping up a lot. You raise a very important point, and I actually didn't think about this until I was writing the essay. It's not an unambiguous good because it's the impact is variable, and it's really hard to predict that. How did you grapple with that in your essay? How did you make sense of it all at the end?

Mikkael Sekeres: I don't think I did. I don't think I still have, which is why I think I still reflect back 25 years later on this episode and thinking about her children and how they're now, maybe they're still continuing to receive these cards from her and whether that's something they really appreciate and are like, “Boy, this is great, I get a little piece of mom still even now,” or do they look at her unsteady hand as she's writing these cards and say, “That's not the mom I want to remember.”

Henry Bair: Yeah, that's a really good point. In the essay, I talk about that moment when the patient recognizes these are very imperfect letters, imperfectly written. We talked a little bit about that. And the patient makes a point, very wisely. I had suggested, "Oh, what if you want me to correct things?" And he's like, "No, no, no, the mistakes are part of it. It's part of the message. The message is that this was me at a difficult time in my life. I cannot control my hands the way that I used to, but that's still part of me. That makes it more genuine and authentic, mistakes and all built in.” He wanted his children to see him for who he fully was in that moment.

Mikkael Sekeres: And that was such a poignant part of your essay and probably the one that jumped out at me the most. Like as a dad, you want your kids to see you for who you are, right? You're not a superhero. In this case, this is somebody who was going to succumb to his illness, who did, but he was their dad and wanted them to remember him for all of who he was at that moment.

Before I let you go, Henry, because I feel like we could probably talk for hours about this, before we started this podcast, I noticed you had better podcast equipment than I do, and sure enough, you copped to the fact that you do host your own podcast. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Because it touches on so many themes we touched on here in Cancer Stories.

Henry Bair: Yeah, well thanks for asking me about that. Yeah, don’t mind if I plug a little bit. Yes, so in medical school, this was 2021, around 2022, we were emerging from the COVID pandemic, and one of the things I was seeing around me as a medical student were physicians and nurses leaving the profession in droves. Like, there were so many reports and surveys coming out of the AMA discussing how more than half of all physicians are burned out, a third of physicians can't find meaning in their work anymore. And that was really scary. As a clinical trainee, what was I getting myself into? These weren't just some clinicians somewhere. These were often times- I was hearing these kinds of conversations about losing sight of why they even come in in the first place to work. I was hearing these conversations from professors that I thought were well-accomplished. These were people who had gone to the right residencies, the right fellowships. They had the right publications. These are people who I aspired to be, I suppose, and they were talking about leaving clinical practice.

A wonderful mentor of mine who is an oncologist, still an oncologist at Stanford, we started talking about these things. And I asked him, "You seem to love your job." He was a GI oncologist dealing with very, very sick patients day in and day out. I've seen him in clinic. And I asked him, "What's your secret? What keeps you coming back over and over and over again?" And so that led to a conversation. And then we realized, “Wait a second, there are people, a third of physicians losing meaning in their work meant that two thirds of physicians have meaning in their work. Okay, let's talk about that.” So we started exploring, we started just asking clinicians who have found true purpose in their work. And then we asked them to share their stories. And that's how the podcast was born. It's called The Doctor's Art, and at this point, we've expanded and we interview nurses and patients and caregivers. We interview philosophers and filmmakers, journalists. We interview ethicists and religious leaders, really anyone who might have some insight about what living well means either from the clinician perspective or from the patient perspective. And guess what? Everyone is going to be either a caregiver or a care recipient at some point in their lives. It's still ongoing and it's ended up being something where we explore very universal themes.

Mikkael Sekeres: Well, it sounds great, Henry, and it sounds like a perfect complement to what we're doing here in Cancer Stories.

It has been such a pleasure to have Dr. Henry Bair, who is an ophthalmology resident at Wills Eye Hospital, to discuss his essay, "The Quiet Work of Clarity". Henry, thank you so much for submitting your article to the Journal of Clinical Oncology and for joining us today.

Henry Bair: Thank you very much, Mikail, for letting me share my insights and my story. It was a wonderful opportunity.

Mikkael Sekeres: If you've enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review. Your feedback and support helps us continue to have these important conversations. If you're looking for more episodes and content, follow our show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and explore more from ASCO at asco.org/podcasts.

Until next time, this has been Mikkael Sekeres for Cancer Stories.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

 

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Show notes:
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Guest Bio:
Dr Henry Bair is a ophthalmology resident physician at Wills Eye Hospital and podcast host of The Doctor’s Art.