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The Phone and I

John F. Fisher, MD

    My relationship with the telephone has always been schizophrenic—love or hate. My earliest recollections were of a single, ebony device whose base was a rounded rectangle with a pyramidal perch for the receiver on a table in the hall. In the days of party lines, when I tried to use it to call a friend, invariably someone else seemed to be on the line nattering with someone in a high-pitched, strident voice incessantly whining about something or someone. This woman’s pitiable husband, assuming anyone would marry her, had to be on the verge of murder or suicide to avoid a psychotic break from a life of acoustic trauma.
    When private lines, wall phones, and a second one in the bedroom became commonplace, I began to view them as quite convenient for conversations with friends or prospective dates, unless my mother might be listening on the extension. In college, calls were all outgoing on a payphone, collect to my parents, or to a girlfriend until I ran out of quarters which was usually in middle of my alibi as to why I hadn’t called lately. My next call to her moments later yielded a busy signal.
    Notwithstanding the occasional annoyance, I kept a mostly favorable view of telephones until I became an intern at Cincinnati Children’s when the device developed an attitude toward me. After it rang that first night in the on-call quarters I remember thinking that I had an opportunity to show the nurses how nice I could be, despite being startled awake at 2:00AM after just dozing off. I was almost as nice at 3:30AM, but at the 5:00AM call, I was completely faking it. Since my call schedule was every other night for the year, the phone became my adversary, on the rare occasion that I was even able to lie down. Even rarer was the ability to address the nurse’s phone request while still supine. For the most part, I was able to resist the temptation to slam the receiver down, but it was usually necessary to get out of bed and go to a child’s bedside for an exam or to restart an iv. Restarting ivs in infants or toddlers was always challenging because there was no reasoning with the little angels as to why they were needed in the first place and no way to make the butterfly needle less painful. Moreover, these little veins were hard to stick after the several minutes (at least) it took to find one. In babies, a phone call about an infiltrated iv meant at least 30 minutes at the crib-side to change one and there was no waiting until morning because all of them needed the fluids and usually antibiotics too. But taking good care of sick people is what I signed up for. So, quit your whining and complaining, Doctor! Nevertheless, those days and the countless calls in my career which followed explain my Pavlovian aversion to a telephone call to this day.
    Nowadays, I have a phone, you have a phone, and most of God’s children have a phone— on their person! But the exception is that you like yours and your entire world revolves around it. Amazingly, right now, you can and do check 10 crucial things like:
    1. how the exact Greenwich Mean Time corresponds to that on your Apple watch
    2. how the precise temperature correctly has provided an explanation to the sweat staining the underarms of your shirt or blouse
    3. each of the company and private emails you received while you were at lunch or at exercise including the ones about fashion, insurance, and sundry phishing attempts you are receiving now
    40 texts and images from twelve friends and family members describing each of their activities in real time
    5. the latest scores from sporting events including Rory McIlroy’s score on hole number eight in the second round of the Arnold Palmer Invitational
    6. tweets from the President and his adversaries or by celebrities which call for an immediate favorable or vitriolic response
    7. confirmation from the weather app that it is actually raining now and how fast that cell is moving
    8. the exact distance or number of steps you have taken to this point today
    9. your precise GPS location on your neighborhood walk with your dog when you stop to clean up after him
    10. the people who liked or loved the image or video you posted in the last hour on Facebook or Instagram

    The beauty of these enterprises is that, if you are skillful, you can do all this while driving or without having to make eye contact with any passerby. True, you may bump into someone on the sidewalk or sideswipe the car next to you as you are looking down, but you are content in your own little world and needn’t interact in person with anyone anymore.
    I, on the other hand, will be holstering my phone, expecting to hear from no one and, I dare say, hoping for no robocalls about an extended warranty for my car or unwanted texts about hearing aids. Instead I will be enjoying a ride or walk out in Mother Nature. Furthermore, I will relish the silence of quiet contemplation about my time on this planet with family, friends, and former patients, grateful that I am still alive, hoping I have made a difference to some of these people. I might even pray. While you are checking out the number of likes, loves, and emojis for your most recent post on Facebook, I will be enthusiastically planning to give my next project my full attention today without distraction, hoping that it will be of some benefit to someone—perhaps even you.

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