Iconic Image, Lasting Hope
“I still have pain,” she said. “Because my nerves are really damaged. They don’t work well. So pain in one area spreads everywhere I got burned… ”The pain I consider as my protection. It humbles me, and helps me to never take my life for granted,” she said. “And to share my story.”
Kim Phuc Phan Thai, the girl in the iconic photo of the Viet Nam war,now age 46, spoke the other day at the Hearst Burn Center at NY-Presbyterian Hospital where I worked as a tissue procurement tech . She told her trying story of suffering burns to over 60% of her body and having 17 procedures to treat her injuries. Her story shines a light on that undefinable threshold at which physical, high tech medicine leaves off and human courage and coping take over. I don’t care whether you areRay Kurzweil and believe that you are going to upload your being into a silicon chip and escape mortality or not, everyone will face a point at which technology will fail us and the human spirit, and the sense of gratitude for one’s being must take over. Some patients cross that nebulous threshold before they ever enter the modern health care system. Others, sadly never do.
My job as a Skin Bank technician was to procure allograft (donor) skin tissue for burn victims like Kim Phuc. Donor tissue is used for grafting only when burns are so extensive that normal tissue from the patient’s own body cannot be spared. And it only acts as a temporary biological “bandage” until the patients own tissues heal and regenerate. Some of our grafts went to patients who were burned in the 9-11 tragedy. The burn unit filled up quickly at this time 8 years ago with perhaps, the highest concentration of severe burns that the unit has ever seen. These are some of the most physically and psychologically challenging injuries that one can endure and the people who treat them for a living are true angels.
One day in medical school we were discussing alternative medicine and its implications to modern medical practice. Richard Cohen M.D., a former medical school professor of mine and a gem of a human being, challenged us with a question. He said, don’t ask yourselves why patients continue to use alternative medicines that may or may not help them physically. Ask yourselves how you as “modern” medical professionals have so failed them, that they feel the need to pursue other therapy. Dr. Cohen had a saying, “always make the patient feel better than when he came in the door.” What he was saying was that in medicine, we can’t always make people “physically” better, but so much of health is not actually about that. It’s about what Kim Phuc is saying: giving positive meaning to the inevitable limitations of our physical being. Our mission as physicians should be as much about guiding our patients over that threshold between science and coping as it about the science itself. This can only be accomplished through time and a real doctor patient relationship; something that “the system” does not always encourage. Let’s keep this in mind moving forward with this reform debate. True healing takes time. And a system that does not reward this, fails us.
