From Creative Writing to Medicine

For some, pursuing a medical career is an all-consuming passion. What do you do if you have two? In this ASCO Education podcast, we look at the influences that propelled Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum to become a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a national correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Rosenbaum will explain the family legacy that impacted her choice to pursue medicine (1:46), her discovery of the love of writing (5:02) and what prompts her to write about specific topics (15:53).

Speaker Disclosures Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: None Dr. David Johnson: Consulting or Advisory Role – Merck, Pfizer, Aileron Therapeutics, Boston University Dr. Patrick Loehrer: Research Funding – Novartis, Lilly Foundation, Taiho Pharmaceutical

Resources:  Gray Matters: Analysis and Ambiguity by Lisa Rosenbaum, MD Podcast: Oncology, Etc. - In Conversation with Dr. Peter Bach (Part 1) Podcast: Oncology, Etc. – In Conversation with Dr. Peter Bach (Part 2)

If you liked this episode, please follow the show. To explore other educational content, including courses, visit education.asco.org. Contact us at education@asco.org.

TRANSCRIPT

Disclosures for this podcast are listed in the podcast page.

 Pat Loehrer: Welcome to Oncology, Etc. an ASCO Education Podcast. I'm Pat Loehrer, Director of Global Oncology and Health Equity at Indiana University.

Dave Johnson:  Hi, I'm Dave Johnson, a medical oncologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, Texas.

If you're a regular listener to our podcast, welcome back. If you're new to Oncology, Etc., the purpose of our podcast is to introduce listeners to interesting people and topics in and outside the world of oncology, hence the "etcetera" in our name. Today's guest is an example of the "etcetera" aspect of our podcast. Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum is a practicing cardiologist at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty. She's a highly respected national correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Rosenbaum began her writing career while she was still an undergraduate at Stanford. She later attended med school at the University of California, San Francisco, completed an internal medicine residency at the Mass General Hospital in Boston, and a cardiology fellowship at Weill Cornell in New York. She spent an additional year of fellowship at The New England Journal, where she learned about writing, reporting, and investigative journalism. Subsequently, she was hired for an academic position at Brigham and presented with an opportunity to write on a regular basis for The New England Journal. She's written on a whole variety of topics, ranging from physician burnout to cognitive bias, resident duty hours, conflicts of interest, vaccine hesitancy, and many other topics.

 So, Lisa, thank you for joining us today. We're very excited to have you on the program.

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Johnson: Well, perhaps we could start by asking you to just tell us a little about your background and your family.

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: I grew up in Portland, Oregon. My parents are both physicians. My father is a rheumatologist and my mom is a cardiologist, and now my sister is also an endocrinologist. And we have several family members who are physicians, including my grandfather, who was also a rheumatologist and a writer and played a pretty pivotal role in my life, both in terms of my decision to become a physician and also a writer. When he was in his 70's, he got laryngeal cancer and he was treated with radiation therapy and cured. But after, he wrote a book about the experience of being a patient called A Taste of My Own Medicine, which I think was published in the late 80's. It's an autobiography. And then in the early 90's, Disney bought the rights to the book and made it into the movie The Doctor, starring William Hurt. He has a cameo, actually, and apparently it took him like 17 takes just to get it right, to wave his hand when he's sitting in the waiting room.

That was a pretty formative experience in my life, because basically he ended up, after writing that book and, you know, having a lot of success with it, wanting to write another book. And by then he was in his late 80's, and he ended up getting Parkinson's disease, which steadily progressed. He died at 94, so he lived a long, good life. But when I got into medical school, he decided he wanted to write a book with me and that it was sort of the follow up to A Taste of My Own Medicine, because he sort of recognized medicine's shortcomings in the book and asked a lot of questions, but he would always say, "I have more questions than I have answers." And when I got into medical school, he had this idea that we were going to come up with all the answers and make medicine as wonderful as it had once been for him. So obviously that was a big part of my life, both in terms of my career as a writer and also my career as a doctor. Though I think I really never questioned whether or not I wanted to be a doctor. That just sort of seemed so obvious to me as a kid that the work was so meaningful. And I don't know, there's something about growing up where everywhere you go, people tell you how one of your relatives made their lives better. That's pretty inspiring, as a kid.

Pat Loehrer: It's interesting that both your parents were physicians, but you claim that your grandfather is the one that got you into medicine. But I think your early career, I think you were actually kind of focused on writing and writing creative fiction, and there was another event in your life that kind of turned you back over to medicine too, right?

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: Right, right. And I don't want to not give credit to my parents. They played a huge, wonderful role in my life as well, and they still do.

 So anyway, I did take a detour in my career. So, in college I ended up, the fall of my junior year, taking a creative writing class. I'd done all the pre-med requirements by then and probably like many pre-meds, it felt very robotic to me. It's also, you're surrounded by all these people who are really ambitious, and you can feel like you're not very good, right? I remember I made a B-minus on my first organic chemistry exam, and I called my mom crying, and I was like, "I'm not going to be a doctor. This is a disaster." So all of a sudden, once I had gotten through those classes and I took this creative writing class, it was just this transformative experience for me because it was intensely creative. And I've always been just really interested in people, like what makes people do what they do, and character. I am just so fascinated by people's characters.

 But the other part of the creative writing classes that I loved so much was just the sense of community. So you go from this setting where you're all sort of pitted against one another in these classes, and then you're in this place where everybody's trying to help each other and you're learning about each other through writing because we're all really just like writing about ourselves, even when we pretend otherwise. And I made some of the best friends of my life who've gone on to have actually remarkable writing careers. So sort of on a whim because it was so enriching for me and I felt like I couldn't live without it, I applied for MFA's in Creative Writing in my senior year, and I got rejected everywhere but waitlisted at Columbia. And then I got in. So I moved to New York in 2001, basically a week before September 11th, and I truly fell apart. Not in a way that I regret at all now. I think that a lot of us, when we are not productive, feel like our time is wasted. And I don't think I wrote a word that entire year. Like, I got really depressed and I just spent a lot of time wandering the city and I ate a lot of bagels, but I was really sad. I spent a lot of time downtown, like, looking at the faces of all these people who had died. And it was so unfathomable to me. And I wasn't able to use writing to cope with it as I might be able to now. I think I was just too young. And I had challenges with my writing professor who sort of felt like we shouldn't be writing about that.

 And so I ran away from writing. I mean, I dropped out of creative writing school and went to medical school, and that was clearly the right move. More than anything in my life, I love being a doctor, so I don't regret that at all. And I think it actually was really helpful to me to recognize that I'm not cut out to just be a writer. I need to be inside people's lives, and there's no better way to do that than as a physician. And writing is this extra bonus that I have still that helps me just like it did when I was writing fiction, sort of try to understand the world. But I don't think I could function if I didn't get to take care of patients. And that became clear when I was 22 years old, essentially.

 Dave Johnson: So, Lisa, you did this fellowship at the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you tell us about that? What was that like? And how much influence did that have in your current position?

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: It was awesome on so many levels. I think the first was that I really loved listening to people talk about science. That was new for me. And the rigor of the conversations at The Journal is really just hard to describe, and I just felt like I was like a kid in a candy shop. I'm interested in science, obviously, as a practicing physician, but I'm interested in science always in these meta ways. I'm interested in how we communicate science and the words we use and the conflicts that we focus on and those that we don't. And so much was always going on in my mind. ‘I was like, oh, my God, these are the data that are going to shape our practice. And then you have, like, a bunch of humans making these decisions.’ And so that was inherently fascinating to me.

 And the other thing that was really transformative was just sort of watching Jeff Drazen, who was the editor in chief at the time, and just how he led was so amazing to me. And I still think about it because, you know, in an ideal environment, I mean, people study this their whole lives, you know, organizational psychology and things like that. But, you know, to create a work environment where you can have, like, all these brilliant people sort of have a conversation and argue with each other and still come out friends was really remarkable to me. I don't think I could ever tell you what the recipe for that is, but I loved watching Jeff do his thing.

And then, of course, on the most personal level, it was eleven years after I had tried and failed to be a writer in New York and all of a sudden I had medical training under my belt and I had a lot I wanted to say and I was capable in a way that I wasn't before of spending my days writing. So it turned out that I was able to structure my time and not just fall into a deep depression. So that was really important to me in terms of shaping my ambition. I still didn't believe that it was possible to have a job as a doctor and a writer until I was actually offered that job. But at least I knew that I loved it as much as I ever had. 

 They published what I wrote, and it's hard to describe, like, how that changes you in terms of realizing that, like, anybody might care what you had to say. You know, my experience until then had been writing this stuff with my grandfather, which was so inherently meaningful, but I could never get it published. I mean, the piece that I think that I'm still most proud of is what I ultimately wrote about my grandfather and this book project and it's called ‘The Art of Doing Nothing.’

 I had a knee injury at the time, and I was in med school, and I couldn't get the doctor to do anything about it. And I was really compromised. I couldn't walk, and I was going into internship. And the prospect that I wasn't going to be able to do what I needed to do as an intern was just so terrifying to me. And so it sort of goes back and forth between that experience and my grandfather's ambition for us to fix medicine and his sense that something so fundamental had been lost. And it ends—I'm going to start crying when I talk about this—it ends with his death and how I wasn't planning to speak at his funeral, but then I just remembered this sense of something pushed me to walk onto the pulpit after all the other eulogies had been given. And I remember feeling the sense like, ‘Okay, he spent the last seven years wanting me to tell these stories, and I'm never going to be able to convey what he means or the point of his stories. And I could never describe the way he touched people's lives.’ And I just remember when I was standing up there, I looked out and there were hundreds of people, patients, their children, who had just come to celebrate his life. And then this feeling that I didn't have to say anything because everybody already knew. So ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ is this idea that we're so reliant now on all these things that we can do. And my sort of tension with my own doctor was wanting an MRI. And by the way, I completely believe in a lot of the things we can do. I don't see how you could spend a day in the hospital as a cardiologist and not feel some awe for advances in our technologies and what they can do for patients. But I do think a lot of it has come at the expense of our humanity, not by the fault of any physicians, but in a system that just doesn't allow us to give people our time, our attention, or make them feel how much we care about them.

 And so I think for me, the idea that my grandfather practiced at a time where he didn't have an MRI machine and he couldn't revascularize—I mean, he was a rheumatologist, but at that time, he would see patients having MI’s and he did house calls and all these things, but that he could give them his love, for lack of a better word—it's a different type of love, but the love that we can give to patients, and that so many people then remembered him and showed up for him.

 Pat Loehrer: If I can speak on behalf of your grandfather, if he was here, he would say that you have honored him.

 Dave Johnson:Yeah, for sure.

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: That's very kind.

 Dave Johnson: Lisa, you write about so many different things. They're all wonderful. I really appreciate your willingness to bear your soul, so to speak. And speaking of soul, one of my favorite pieces that you wrote was I think it was ‘Heart and Sole’, where you talked about-

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: -broke my feet?

 Dave Johnson: Yeah, your feet. That was great. You, in a sense, mentioned your father. And your father is also a Rheumatologist, actually, your father gave a grand rounds here about seven or eight years ago that was one of the best lectures I've ever heard on uveitis.

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: No, my dad is also huge. I've talked about my mom. I've talked about my grandfather. My dad is a huge part of my life, too. I just love him a whole lot.

 Dave Johnson: Well, that came through in the article about your feet. What I wanted to ask you is obviously a lot of your ideas for writing come from personal experience, but you've also written about things like conflict of interest. You wrote a three-piece article in The New England Journal that actually generated some interesting conversation in the letters to the editor, including from former editors of The New England Journal. I wonder how you come upon these ideas. I mean, what prompts you to write about a particular topic?

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: The two things in my life that like, drive my writing. I mean, I'm not talking about medicine specifically, but I'm extremely emotional. I feel things very intensely, and I think because of that, I've always been interested in the way emotions affect reason, because it's been clear to me for a long time that my emotions could get in the way of my ability to make good decisions. So then I became very interested in sort of the nature of how we make decisions and the role emotion plays in that. And so conflicts of interest were, like, the perfect example of this, both at a very individual level of the way emotion shapes reasoning, but also I'm very interested in sociology, how humans affect one another's perceptions. And I think that series was published in 2015, so it was sort of a little bit before social media became so much more pervasive in our lives, but this idea of sort of collective pile-ons and canceling people that hadn't picked up as much.

 But I was very interested in this tension between advancing care and how that had gotten lost in this sort of desire to vilify people who worked with industry, because it just seemed very obvious to me that we needed that. And I was perplexed as to why we sort of seized on this one aspect of bias when so many biases shape how we behave. And again, that goes back to the fact that I spend my entire life thinking about what is biasing my own behavior. And so I remember very clearly, and I tell this story in the series, in the second essay, how I used to get called when I was a cardiology fellow about transfers from other hospitals overnight and whether or not they should give TPA en route, because if you wait too long to revascularize them, at that time, people were getting TPA. I've only ever worked at a hospital where people get revascularized, so we don't really do it a lot. But anyway, I remember being so tired and so wanting to not go in that I would feel inclined to say, just give TPA, even though it would be better for the patient to get revascularized. And if they would get revascularized, it meant that I would be up all night, because after they would have, like, a sheath, and I would have to pull the sheath, and it was over. And so I remember thinking, like, ‘I'm making a decision out of, like, fatigue and laziness.’ I mean, I didn't actually make decisions this way, but I remember how powerful those forces were in shaping my medical advice. And we all know when we practice in these busy hospitals that so many of our interactions are not about what the science says to do. There are other factors that come into play that are deeply embedded in sort of the sociology of medicine or people's feelings about one another or themselves. And so conflicts of interest was just like, at the nexus of all these things that fascinate me.

 And then the third one was about sort of moral outrage. And again, this was before our politics were as polarized as they are today, for instance. But this idea that when you feel moral outrage, that you lose the ability to weigh trade-offs was extremely interesting to me because, again, it seemed to be at the crux of what was happening in sort of our ability as a profession to talk about how to optimize our relationships with industry so that we could get our patients the best treatments. And that instead of vilifying scientists who either had unique expertise that could be shared with companies to develop treatments, or who were on FDA panels because they were the ones who knew the most, it just seemed to me kind of strange that we weren't able to have those conversations.

 And then when you mentioned all the blowback, I mean, that was the first time in my career, and I've since experienced it again and again. But that felt to me very much part of the problem in the first place, that that like, just saying that this was more nuanced than we were recognizing, you know, generated a lot of anger, and I was, like, totally okay with that, because it it was why I wrote it in the first place. And if I felt that in 2015, I feel that even more now, which is essentially you cannot write about anything interesting anymore without risking being canceled. Like, it's just things are so volatile, and everything I write, I think this might be the end of me. And you sometimes can't predict what is going to enrage people, but it feels, speaking of trade-offs, like a worthwhile trade-off for me because I could write what I know everybody wants to hear, or what they already know, and there's clearly a market for that. But that is so boring to me. And I don't learn anything, and I don't think readers learn anything, so that just doesn't feel like my role in this universe.

Dave Johnson: When do you find time to read?

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: I read like, every night, every afternoon. I mean, I'm constantly reading or listening to podcasts and thinking about what I'm writing, or I'm interviewing people. I read like, all the time.

Pat Loehrer: What are you reading now that you would recommend it?

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: The best books that I've read recently were Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. I don't know if you've read it. It's actually my computer is literally sitting on the book. She also wrote a book that has some oncology relevance. It's called The Storied Life of AJ. Fikry, I think. I finished it the night before I was going on the consult service, and for some reason I wept. There's a cancer part of the story, so you'll see when you read it, I don't want to give it away. But it was one of those moments I think I'll remember forever, just because even though I'm saying all these things about caring about humanity, I still lose it sometimes. And the consult service can be really hard because this goes back to this whole bias thing, because you're just going as fast as you can. It's not because you don't care, it's because there are ten people also who need to be seen. And so you're triaging your time, but also your emotional bandwidth, and you walk into the room and you just hope that you don't get asked a lot of questions and that you can move quickly so you can go see the next consult. And so I finished this book, and I hope it's not giving me too much away. But anyway, someone in the book has cancer and isn't treated very well by the medical system. And so it was like the night before I was going on consults, and it stayed with me in the same way my grandfather stays with me. Just like, take a deep breath, the week will end and you never get a second chance to see these people. So do it right.

Pat Loehrer: I can't wait to read it. One of my residents, when I was an intern, I had a patient that died, and I was just really distraught, but she just quietly said that the beauty of medicine is that it has such a great joy, but it also has these downs, and that's unlike any other profession. And that's really what makes it such a marvelous profession, because of the feeling that you have.

 You're a physician writer. Which physician writers do you think are the most meaningful? Or which ones do you admire the most?

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: I have to tell you, I teach a writing class.

 Pat Loehrer: It's you.

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: For what?

 Pat Loehrer: You're the one that you admire.

 Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: Oh, God, no. That wasn't what I was going to say. It's the opposite. So in the writing class, my editor of the journal and I teach a class to people, mostly to Brigham, but over the years, people from all over have started to join, and we do it on Zoom. And I have to say that there are some people in the class I just think are so talented. And what has struck me most about the experience beyond their talent, is just that physicians often just don't have an opportunity to get to write. And so I lucked out, like I really did. I lucked out in terms of having the opportunity to journal. I lucked out to grow up in a family that was just so loving toward me, telling me I could do whatever I wanted. But not everybody has that luck or privilege. And so to get to be in this writing workshop and see all these people who are just having their first chance to process what they've experienced and narrate it has been really awesome for me. And so they are not the people who are household names yet, but I have been struck by many of their talents. And also my editor and I taught one at Colorado this past summer, and there were some people who are just so equally talented.

So that said, I think Gawande is like a masterful storyteller. He's able to sort of narrate in a way that is so accessible to people, and I think that is a mark of genius. So I do find myself studying his work. I have to tell you that I read mostly fiction, so I don't read a ton of doctor writers anymore. I used to when I was, before I was more established as a doctor writer, and I would do it to study them. But now I just find myself wanting to either read about culture or some sort of nonfiction that is unrelated to medicine or just read pure fiction. I'm mostly interested in how people tell stories and develop characters, and I could think about that forever. It never stops.

Dave Johnson: What advice do you have, Lisa, for young physicians who may be contemplating a career with writing as a part of it? What advice do you have for them?

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum: When you write, you have to expect to fail. And I think that one of the hardest things about being within the institution of medicine and trying to be a writer is that we have these metrics for success that we're all so accustomed to in terms of publications and putting things on our CV and also how those are valued in advancing our careers. And if you really want to write, if it's really important to you, you have to let all of that go. And again, if people meet me at this moment in my life, they don't realize that I had this chunk of time for seven to ten years where I was writing and writing and writing, and I wasn't publishing anything, and I was getting rejected all over. And I did it because it meant so much to me and it meant so much to my grandfather. But if it becomes this thing that is meant to, like, advance your career, I think first of all, it becomes much more frustrating, but also you take away what makes it so meaningful, and I think that ends up detracting from the writing itself because it's just like the purity of it goes away. So I think that's one thing I would say.

 The other thing is if you want to write, you just have to write. There's no other way about it. It's not fun. I mean, I wish people could see how much of my writing gets thrown away. It's so bad. But if you think of it as an act of discovery, which it is, I never know what I'm going to say until I get there. Then you can sort of forgive yourself for all of that time wasted. But it's pretty empathetical to how we function as doctors. I mean, when I go into the hospital, it's like a switch flips in my brain. I move into this extremely efficient, concrete sort of way of existing, and it's just so different from the mode I'm in when I'm creating.

 Dave Johnson: That's extremely helpful. Thank you for that Lisa.

 We want to thank all of our listeners of Oncology, Etc. This is an ASCO educational podcast. This is where we will talk about oncology medicine and beyond. So if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you would like us to interview, please email us at education@asco.org. To stay up to date with the latest episodes and explore other educational content, please visit education.asco.org. Thanks again.

 Pat Loehrer: Hey, Dave, I got something for you.

Dave Johnson: A present?

 Pat Loehrer: No. A question for you. Which knight of King Arthur invented the roundtable? Sir Cumference. Doesn't get any better than that.

 Dave Johnson: No, the snail joke was better.

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