Transcriber: Fabiano Júnior Reviewer: Emi Atarashi
Wow! Look at all the people here.
(Laughter)
I’m... uh... I’m Gene Rontal.
And I’m here to talk to you about Imagination and creativity.
I looked at the audience before I came out,
and I came to the conclusion that
there aren’t too many of you out here who’ve been in a prison.
(Laughter)
I have!
You see, I’m an otolaryngologist or ear, nose and throat doctor.
I went to the University of Michigan Medical School,
where I got my medical education.
When I finished, I went to Minnesota for my surgical residency.
When I got there, I found out that
the chief of the department had made a deal with the state of Minnesota
to provide health care for the inmates at the state penitentiary.
This was the most scary event
in my life of medicine
... only until today when I found out I was going to give this talk.
(Laughter)
So I... I went to the prison, and I was not happy about it.
I didn't sign up for that.
Every time I'd go to the prison, I would say to myself,
“What the hell am I doing here? I’m not going to be a prison doctor.”
But I got to thinking I’ve got to finish my residency and go into practice,
and it wasn’t a wise idea to make the boss angry with me.
So I toughed it out.
When you went to the prison,
there was a large door that walked into a two‐storied lobby.
At the top of the lobby was a balcony with ten turrets, and in it were
ten loaded rifles aimed at this huge stainless steel door with bars on it.
To get into the prison, you had to get the officer to open the door.
We’d walk in about 15 feet,
and all of a sudden there was a huge bang,
and a chill went down your back,
and I could see all of the inmates waking up probably because of this,
and they stood in front of the cell and watched as I walked down the hallway
with my black bag yelling at me, saying, “Hey, doc! You got a key?
I got to get out of here!”
or “Hey, doc! You got any drugs?“
Nothing happened.
A few months later in my rotation, it was my turn to do surgery at the prison.
Before I left, a couple of residents in my program told me that
they had had a problem a few months ago:
a patient had died after having surgery at the... at the prison.
And they did an inspection.
They said... was... they found out that
the inmates who ran the prison weren’t sterilizing the instruments.
Can you believe that?
Sterility is like the number one thing in all of medicine.
You wash your hands, you wear gloves, you put antiseptics on things.
They didn’t. They didn’t do it.
And it really struck me bad.
But it was good for one thing.
It became the basis of the first medical mystery thriller I ever wrote
called “Sterile Justice.”
Now, wait a minute!
Doctors don’t write mystery stories.
Doctors write textbooks.
Doctors write articles in medical journals,
but they don’t write medical thrillers.
Maybe there are a few of them out there like me.
Well, I can tell you that my undergraduate teacher... English teacher
here at Michigan was right on...
on the spot when he was talking about me not being able to write
because he gave me the worst grades I ever got in high school,
college or medical school.
(Laughter)
And he didn’t really...
I’m partially to blame because the first day I walked into the class,
I had a slide rule on my belt.
And... and he immediately figured out that I was one of those science geeks and I was
only taking his course because it was a requirement.
Well, you know, he really didn't know me. I love telling stories.
I love reading books.
And I didn’t think much more of the incident.
I tried to put my English teacher out of the...
out of the concepts that I had, and I let it ride.
Several years later,
my wife and I went on a vacation with some friends.
And for some odd reason, I told the story about the...
about the... the prison and what happened.
And one of my friends said to me,
”Boy, that’s a great story. You ought to write a book.”
It was like somebody turned the light on in a dark room.
I decided I was going to write a book. Never wrote one before.
When I got home, I started.
I would work during the day and write during the night.
I had no idea how it... how it is a solitary business to write books
and how much time it took.
It took a lot of time away from my family, and I didn't like that.
Fortunately, my wife was very supportive.
She told me I should finish the book.
And eventually it took me a year to write it,
and I had this manuscript.
Now I had to get a publisher.
Well, in order to get a publisher, you have to write a query letter.
The query letter contains the information
about the book that you’re writing and about the author.
I sent in 139 query letters.
And I got 139 rejections.
Let me tell you.
Rejection isn’t good for your psyche.
I was mad.
I was mad that I wasted all that time.
I was angry with myself because I had...
I had let my ego get bigger than my common sense.
Well, I sat down at my desk after that,
and I happened to come across a piece of paper on the desk that I hadn't seen.
It was the last query letter, and I hadn’t sent it in.
And I decided to make a deal with myself.
I’m going to send it in, and if it gets rejected,
that’s the end of my writing career.
Well, No. 140 became a...
... became an author for a large publishing house on the West Coast.
(Applause)
I think most people believe that doctors don't have imagination.
They’re kind of, say, imagination is like daydreaming or something like that.
It’s not true. Doctors have a lot of imagination.
I’ll give you an example.
I had this patient who had knee surgery.
And everything I’d found is, including cure, not her... her knee
but when it came to her voice, she had no voice, could not speak.
All she could do was breathe.
This is probably a result of anesthesia mishap.
She came to my office. She was distraught.
And you can imagine how upset she was, and she wanted to be cured,
and it was difficult for her to even look at me.
I decided that I would look at her vocal cords,
and when I did, I found out that
one of the small cartilages in your voice box had been dislocated.
That means it was shoved off of its base,
and it floated down on top of her vocal cords,
so the vocal cords couldn’t move back and forth.
I imagined what I could do for her.
During this time period, I’ve been using Botox to help people
with neuromuscular dysfunctions of their body and their voice,
and I thought if I injected Botox
into the muscles that were pulling this cartilage down,
the normal muscles would pull the cartilage up.
I discussed it with her.
She decided that she wanted to have the procedure, and we did it.
Everything went fine.
Two weeks later, she came to my office, walked in the door,
and I said to her, “How are you doing?”
In a perfect voice, We had a conversation.
It was no problem with her voice to speak with me.
I looked at her vocal cords and they were perfect.
But not everything that happens in imagination with doctors
are necessarily like that.
And I use my book writing as kind of an example of that.
When you write a book,
you have to try and get yourself into the emotions of the people
that you’re describing.
And it’s the same way with patients.
I’ll give you an example.
My... I had this patient who saw me on a regular basis
every couple of times a year.
He was an outdoors kind of guy, and he was fun to be around.
He gave me some nice stories.
But he came to my office, and he was withdrawn, and he..
he was just not there: no... no jolliness about him, no... no talking,
and something was wrong.
I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, “I got this cough.”
“Well, how did you get the cough?”
So he told me he was on his snowmobile on an ice flow on Lake St Clair,
going ice fishing, when the wind came out and blew him into the lake,
and the coast guard had to come and rescue him.
Well, when he told me that, he was kind of sheepish about it,
but he was still fidgeting.
He was still not looking me in the eyes and talking to me
like a character in my book who was trying to hide something.
Finally, I pressed him so hard about what was going on with his cough.
He says, “Doc, I got to tell you this. I’ve had this cough for a long time.
I've been smoking cigarettes since I was a teenager,
and I’m worried that I got something more than that.”
I said, “Okay, let’s find out.”
So I listen to his lungs. They were clear.
I said, “Let’s go and get a CAT scan on you and find out
if there’s anything in there.”
The next day I got the CAT scan.
The radiologist called me back,
and he said, “There’s no tumor in this man’s lungs,
but he has a calcium deposit on the left side of his chest.”
I know what that means.
That means there’s a blockage in one of the arteries in his heart.
I got him an appointment the day after to a cardiologist,
and I didn’t see him for three weeks.
Three weeks he comes into the office, and he says, “I got to thank you.”
I said, “What happened?”
“Well, the doctor found that
I had a 95% blockage of the left anterior descending coronary artery.”
Doctors re...call that as the widow-maker.
If this man had not had that conversation with me,
he probably wouldn’t be around here to find out what he was really worried about.
And I found that this not only happened in a dramatic session like that,
but I've noticed in my practice that patients come in and they're fearful.
It's because they have Internet doctors.
They read everything that’s on the Internet,
and they make their own diagnoses.
By the time they come into your office,
they’re sure that they’ve got the worst thing possible that could happen to them.
And it’s important to understand that
I don’t want to be critical of them. I want to help them.
If you understand their emotions, you can settle them down and make them feel that
when they leave the office, they’ve been taken care of.
And that worked for me.
Imagination is the fuel that ignites creativity.
And you are listening to imagination in your own brain every single day:
something that you’re going to imagine.
You may listen to it. You may just throw it away
or you may realize that it may be something good for you.
You may... might listen to your imagination and create something.
It doesn’t have to be creating the next great medical device.
It doesn’t have to be solving the social problems of the world.
It could be something like cooking
or painting or something at your job that makes it easier.
But you’ve got to listen to it to... to make it work.
And I found that if you do it, you’ve got to stick with it
because if you don’t,
you’ll never have the satisfaction of what it will do for you.
This can take time, and there will be a lot of bumps in the road,
and I encourage you to stay with it
because at the end you’re going to have satisfaction.
I know because I did it,
and it has truly made my life better.
Thank you!
(Applause)