Free Every Patient Tells a Story by Lisa Sanders Page A

a few words of welcome and then outlined the events of the morning. We would hear two versions of a patient’s story, first as the patient told it and then as it might have been written up by a doctor caring for the patient in the hospital.
    The stories were to be performed by Dr. Alita Anderson. Anderson is a young black woman in her early thirties. A Yale Medical School graduate (class of 2000), Anderson spent a year interviewing patients about their experiences in the health care setting. All of the patients she interviewed were African American, most were poor; many were poorly educated as well. All had multiple encounters with a medical system that was only sometimes responsive to their needs. She now travels around the country performing the stories she collected from this often unheard population.
    Anderson gave Angoff a hug and then walked slowly across the stage. She began to sing a slow sad song in a husky alto. I couldn’t quite understand the words and I didn’t recognize the song, but it sounded like some kind of spiritual.
    Anderson settled in a lonely chair on the stage and finished the song. She sat quietly for a moment and then said in a rumbly southern voice, “In June 1967, I went to Vietnam. I was a member of the First Infantry Division. My first evening there, they sent me out on an ambush.” She didn’t have any props, nor a costume, but through her voice and expressions she became this middle-aged black man who never recovered from the battlefields and bars of his year in the Vietnam War. She portrayed this man, clearly destroyed by an almost lethal dose of post-traumatic stress disorder, drugs and liquor. It was a compelling performance.
    Anderson, still speaking as this sad middle-aged man, described a particularly difficult episode in his life. “I had been drinking. I was very loud and belligerent that night and my sister, who is probably the closest person to me, walked off and said that she was never going anywhere with me again. Afterward, I went out to the Dumpster and I threw the bottle inthat Dumpster and I said that I was never going to drink anymore. I tried to stop on my own, but the next morning when the liquor store was open I was right there buying another bottle. A lot of times, people—they want off but they have no control. That is what the bondages of Satan do, using alcohol and drugs.”
    When she finished this man’s monologue, Anderson sang a reprise of the sad song that she’d started with. As she sang, a slide appeared on a screen behind her. Anderson seamlessly switched into a professional voice, with crisp diction and shorn of any accent as she read a re-creation of what a hospital admission note from any of his many hospital admissions might have read. “Chief complaint—a thirty-four-year African American male brought in by police; a question of a drug overdose.
    “The history of the presenting illness: The patient was found unresponsive and brought to ER. He was intubated in the field to protect his airway since he was actively seizing, which caused respiratory depression when he was found. In the ER, the patient was minimally responsive to pain. Per police, he had 3 grams of cocaine in pocket. He has been identified by his driver’s license as Mr. R. Johnson whose prior medical records indicate multiple past admissions for drug overdose.”
    The students sat in rapt silence throughout the hour-long performance. The contrast between the rich, detailed life portrayed by the young doctor-reporter and the spare, cold language with which it was portrayed in the imagined, but realistic, admission note could not have been stronger. Afterward the students sat in small groups discussing the morning’s event. They were moved by the patient’s story and horrified by its translation into the coolly impersonal language of medicine.
    Angoff sees this as an opportunity to demonstrate what patients see all the time: the cold and depersonalizing language and process of