It is with great honor that I introduce the Harvard
School of Dental Medicine Class of 2019 speaker, Tom Ferlito.
[APPLAUSE]
Tom was born and raised in North Andover, Massachusetts
and attended Bowdoin College, where he graduated
with a degree in biochemistry.
At HSDM, Tom is known for his extensive sports knowledge,
carefree attitude, and uncanny ability
to make a joke on my behalf.
While at HSDM, Tom has developed his interest
in dental innovation and currently has
a patent pending for an appliance that
influences the oral microbiome.
Tom will continue his training next year
at HSDM with a residency in orthodontics.
His remarks are titled, "What Happened Here?"
Please join me in welcoming my classmate and friend, Tom
Ferlito.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Jill, and thank you to my wonderful class
for giving me this opportunity today.
I was two years old when I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
And I was 12 years old when I received my first insulin pump.
Being about 100 pounds, the adult needle
Dr. G told me to inject in my abdomen every three days
looked far too big to me.
I soon learned to hate it.
Most of the injections hurt, but I
feared that one day I would really choose the wrong spot
to place it.
I was 13 years old when I did.
Lying on the bathroom floor with a needle stuck,
collapsed in pain as my birthday party carried on downstairs.
I bit my fingers so I wouldn't yell as I ripped it out.
The worst part wasn't the pain.
It was having to stand up and inject it again.
I remember composing myself afterwards
and apologizing to my friends for keeping them waiting.
I remember how my hands would shake every three
days thereafter.
But I also remember Dr. G at my next appointment,
glancing at a printout of my A1C before slamming
his fist on his desk.
Mr. Thomas, he yelled, what happened here?
And I remember I didn't answer it because I
didn't want to play his game.
He had, in fact, told me once that the smart ones always
have an excuse.
A smart one could go to Harvard and roast you
at their graduation speech.
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]
My mom's cringing over there.
Don't worry.
I won't actually roast him today.
[LAUGHTER]
Regardless of his opinion.
This speech is not about spite.
It's not about revenge.
It's not about self-pity.
This speech is about the nurse practitioner who
cared enough to switch me to other more suitable needles
I hadn't even known existed.
It's about our families and the principles
they instilled in us.
And it's about our mentors who showed us
by example how to apply those qualities to health care.
It's about the question my story raises of what kind of doctors
we want to be.
And it's about the answer we consistently gave over
the past four years and the ways we chose to care.
For us, caring started early on.
We came into health care because we wanted to help,
and we quickly realized an important nuance--
the difference between caring for patients
and caring about them.
It happened when Marissa allowed her patient without a cell
phone to make calls on hers during their appointments,
when Sarah [INAUDIBLE] kindly informed her patient that what
he was drinking out of was not the water fountain,
but actually the emergency eyewash station.
[LAUGHTER]
It happened when we educated instead of admonished,
when we did not shy away from medicine apart from the mouth.
And it happened because we saw each of our patients
not as a single variable, not the number of cavities
they had, an A1C reading on a print out, a weight on a scale,
but rather as what they are, something unquantifiable that
should never be confined to a single term.
But we also soon realized that caring about people is tough.
It's tiring.
And so we continue to do so, we need
to be able to care about ourselves
is what kept us grounded, lent us perspective, and gave us
things to talk about with faculty at daily afternoon tea.
During our time here, we should be proud
that we never lost ourselves.
We are artists, musicians, food critics, athletes,
[INAUDIBLE] boxing club--
we are said to be more attractive than the med
students.
[LAUGHTER]
We're mothers and fathers of both children and dogs--
dogs named Guinness, Buster, Symbol, Loki, Joey,
and, for some reason, Duck.
[LAUGHTER]
I apologize to the cat people.
Elena has, like, 12 cats, so I couldn't mention them here.
[INAUDIBLE] is still surfing.
[INAUDIBLE] is still dancing.
Jill somehow still likes the New York Jets.
And Beck, without question, still likes his abs.
[LAUGHTER]
And like our view of our own patients,
we never saw ourselves exclusively as doctor,
but rather as what we are--
something unquantifiable, something beyond health care.
And, paradoxically, we're far better health care providers
because of it.
But we also realize that to best care
about ourselves and our patients,
we need to be able to care about our profession, too.
We did this research, volunteering, activism.
We cared about numbers and demographics.
Sometimes the numbers even scared us, like our debt,
but sometimes they didn't all.
Just ask the 50% of future oral surgeons
from our class who are female, entering into a profession that
is 93% male.
[APPLAUSE]
We cared about those whom we saw the system leave behind,
and we disagreed on how best to help them.
In doing so, we also learned that to care
about these issues, we need to be able to talk,
that the echoing of ideas is dangerous,
and that the creative solutions derived from debate
are, dare I say, among the essentials of our profession.
And as our list of responsibilities
grew ever longer, we arguably learned
the most important lesson--
to care about each other.
We learned this through the good times and the bad,
like when I dropped a denture I've
been working on for months, tried to catch it, and missed.
It was actually fine until I stepped on it.
[LAUGHTER]
We relied on each other in chaotic moments
like that when attending dental school
felt more like attending the Fyre Festival.
[LAUGHTER]
We helped each other everyday by sacrificing our own time
to assist or clean up for someone running late.
In doing so, we didn't just make it through dental school.
We made dental school special together.
And through all of this, we learned the importance
of having support from people we love--
from those who understand the challenges
we face as health care providers.
Personally, I may have lost a few hairs,
but made far more friends, and I really
can't imagine reaching this point without any of you guys.
So far, this speech has been in the past tense--
things we did, ways we cared, obstacles we overcame.
But I hope you will see that this speech was never
about the past.
It was about the future.
It was about people today and tomorrow
who can't afford to smile but do not trust anyone to care.
It was about a 13-year-old kid out there
somewhere now who needs help.
And it was about us and what we will
do for them and for our professions.
We started four years ago as smart ones,
and we became even smarter ones yet,
smarter ones who, all the while, cared
about our patients, no excuses.
But, unfortunately, the world has shown us
that being smart and caring is not always enough.
And so as each of our names is called today,
we need to decide to be something more.
We need to join the ranks of our mentors and decide,
as they did, to care, even when money, power, and pride
threatened to get in the way.
And to do that, like them, we need to be brave ones, too--
brave ones who turn our ideas into action,
who speak our visions into truth; brave ones who
care with a backbone, who stand up for those who can't stand up
for themselves; brave ones who seek out
the darkest corners of our world,
our profession, who stare down those who thrive there,
those who hear us coming even now,
and who ask them in an unwavering
voice, what happened here?
[APPLAUSE]