Last week one of the big news stories was the attack on a certain Lebanese paramilitary/terrorist group, delivered by the detonation of explosive elements hidden inside pagers distributed to its operatives and fighters. Regardless of the opinion you have about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, it is hard to deny that this was a very clever trick perpetrated by their enemy.
It got me thinking about connectivity and how things have changed in the decades since I graduated from medical school. And about the cost this “availability” exerts on our lives.
Starting my internship in 1985, stuck in the hospital sometimes for days on end, we were reliant on the overhead intercom paging system … PAGING DR. IAN ROSS was piped all over the hospital. It was weird hearing the “Dr.” before my name that first on-call day. Is that me? I thought.
There was a fellow intern, in medicine, called April Shamy. She had gone to a different medical school. I never really got to know her (I just did a search and saw that she now practices Hem/Onc). The whole hospital cracked up on July 1, the day we started, as one hapless page operator kept asking overhead, with some frustration in her voice, for APRIL SHOWERS, until finally corrected. It took a long time for April to live that one down.
Pagers, also known as “electric leashes” or “beepers,” were only handed out to certain residents, like those on the cardiac arrest team, back then. The rest of us relied on the overhead system. If, when on-call, we got to lie down for a while, we would simply call the page operator and tell them where we could be contacted … call rooms being in one of the few quiet areas of the hospital, only reachable by phone.
Within a short period of time, we all had pagers when we were on call. They would just go off, with a beep (hence the term “beeper”) and we had to call the operator to find out who wanted us. It was a big deal when, eventually, a text/numeric message could be sent over a pager, obviating the need to call the operator.
Things did not change for a long time. I got used to pagers. There was a nice delay built into them. Before mobile phones were commonplace, nobody expected to hear from you for ten or fifteen minutes. If you were out for a jog, or were in the car, you would have to stop and/or pull over and find a payphone. I would always have quarters in my pocket.
Sure, it was a bit of a pain, but I liked the little delay, not being expected to answer right away. I was probably the last neurosurgeon in North America to get a cellphone … in 2005 when I moved to Los Angeles. It was getting to be just about impossible to find a payphone by then.
I am certain that some people think that it is great that anyone who knows your number can contact you right away, anytime, unless you have turned off your phone or its notifications. But me, I don’t know; and Mrs. Ross feels the same way.
We have been married for a very long time, precisely one week less than the time that I have held the privilege of fixing “MD” after my name. Cathy has been through it all. It really had been “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.”
I probably sound a bit nostalgic for the days of the pager, but it was always a very intrusive element in our lives. And one intrusion is seared firmly into my medial temporal lobes.
It was a humid spring evening, particularly fragrant, even for Mississippi, where we lived at the time. The heavy air, so thick that you could almost touch and feel it, was permeated by a full moon. We were walking the dog. I was punchy, perhaps because I had just finished a particularly punishing run of call. Cathy had not seen much of me lately and was trying to tell me something important, when the chime of my pager jumped us back to another reality. It probably was not anything important … but I never got to find out. Cathy snatched the little bugger out of my hand and threw it in the creek, one that we were conveniently walking beside. I do not remember hearing a splash. It was a little creek, that meandered quite a way down there below the sidewalk. I was not going after it then, in the dark, and did not try in the morning either.
My initial reaction was predictable. But as Cathy’s scowl morphed into a very satisfied grin, I reconsidered my feelings. Seen through the misty air, illuminated by the moon and a dim streetlight, so happy was she, with her little act, that I could muster no enthusiasm to engage in combat, and withdrew.
No gift or action, on my part or hers, before or since, has resulted in such a look of satisfaction on my wife’s face. Indeed, she still shines a sweet, sweet smile when we remember that perfumed Southern evening. It was not the first, nor the last, time that frustration with the constant interruptions of my professional life has boiled over; but certainly, the most memorable.
I doubt that my phone is ever going to explode and kill me or someone else. But the interruptions transmitted by it, and the pagers that preceded it, have caused considerable hurt to relationships that are very important to me and my family. I am grateful that my marriage has survived them.