Remember My Name
So if Denzel hasn’t given just about every youth sports coach the perfect pre-game huddle fodder with his “If we don’t come together…” speech in Remember The Titans, then I’m not sure who could. Sports fans remember that line and its power to influence, just like young girls and boys of the 80s were inspired by Fame’s Irene Cara who sang about how we hadn’t seen the best of her yet—that she just wanted us to “remember my name.” I remember, heck I still sing that song to my kids. I also remember when ma used to remember my name and used to razz me for being a Yankee and Celtics fan because, well, that is a pretty ridiculous combination. I remember when I was 7 and how dad read the box score just before school and showed me how to figure out why the Yankees were 3 ½ down to the Sox and how I sorta paid attention because all I really wanted to do was read the puzzles on the back of the Honey Nut Cheerios box. After school, I remember when grape soda pop was good for you because it was delicious and came in a 6-ounce plastic cup for a quarter.
I also remember when we used to use most of our senses to learn stuff – our eyes, ears and nose, heck even our intuition sometimes. I suppose we had no choice unlike most kids today who just use touch and, voila, they have the answer, the song and the directions. I remember when the journey mattered more than the destination and when we got our news from 3 sources –neighbors named Roger who could tell us precisely when the eye of the Hurricane was coming, the morning paper and the nightly news, and that was never more important than during the Vietnam War when Cronkite showed up on the bunny ear RCA every night to tell us “that’s the way it is,” shaping our opinion about what was happening in the war. By 1972, we were fortunate to have a new distraction from the crisis with the war comedy M.A.S.H. I remember how it gave my folks a few laughs amid a sad time and how Hawkeye used to say funny things like “give me life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour,” and how I’d laugh but didn’t have a clue what happy hour was. I remember watching that show not really understanding the sacrifice Hawkeye and the 4077 unit were really making.
I think Memorial Day is probably if nothing else about that – remembering the sacrifice of so many who have served in different ways and given us the freedom to have grape soda and box scores, fictional heroes and some real ones too. Hawkeye, a self-proclaimed “meatball” surgeon, had to make choices like when he had to forgo trying to reconstruct a patient’s damaged artery saying if “I save this leg, I lose that life.”
Healthcare has had its own contingent of crises and pioneers and leaders who we ought to remember for the sacrifices they’ve made for some of the things we take for granted now. Once upon a time, there was no touch a button and your therapist could talk you through a crisis. Nurses would talk to you on the rotary phone at 11 pm to help you figure out how to get through the nausea from that round of chemo, but they wouldn’t be paid for that call, nor the reminder calls to elderly patients the next day to take just the pink medication. There was a whole generation who served with a purpose but without the payment. A cancer practice in Michigan had to “pilot” a program in ’05 where the state’s biggest insurer would pay them for follow-up phone calls. That debate has changed a lot. Now healthcare companies aren’t arguing so much to get paid for follow-up, in fact, many are incented to start doing it. They are able to do things with a combo of clinicians and one-touch technology and get paid for it. They are given time and tools to solve problems. Hawkeye had neither. It’s a good trend and one that continues to evolve, but I think as it does we ought to remember the people who started it. They had to make decisions and sacrifice using every sense they could, without a reward or promise of fame, but in my book, they are Titans, and that’s the way it is. -BC