Art as Recovery with Matthew Wetschler, MD
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You're listening to the Nocturnist Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. What does it mean to push your own limits? Can we make art out of failure? How do we think about the balance between light and shadow, presence and absence? These are just a few of the questions that our next guest has been thinking about for a long time. He's an emergency medicine physician who suffered a spinal cord injury while surfing a few years ago and used painting to aid in, but also to document his recovery. His name is Matthew Wetchler, and I heard him speak at a retreat a few months ago. And as you'll hear in the interview, knew right away that I had to have him on the show to talk about his paintings, which are really more like performance art pieces.
In addition to being a doctor and an artist, Matthew is the CEO of a digital health company called Plume, which offers world-class healthcare to transgender people. Matthew and I cover a lot of ground in this interview. But before we dive in, I want to play an audio clip from the short film Resurrection Artist, which documents Matthew's near-death experience and recovery. Let's roll the clip.
I woke up. Floating in the ocean, I couldn't move. With the last remaining air in my lungs, I screamed into the ocean. I probably had been dead for about 10 minutes. While body surfing, I'd hit my head and I'd fractured my neck and injured my spinal cord. I was an artist, a surfer, and a medical doctor. Even before this, I sought out challenging experiences. What's going to happen with my body? Will I go back to practicing medicine? Will I get back in the water?
Who is Matthew Wetschler and what roles does he combine?
I don't know what's next.
I am sitting here with Matthew Wetchler. Matthew, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
Thanks, Emily. It's good to see you again. And I really appreciate you inviting me to join you.
So Matthew, I think I told you this, but I heard about you and your story before we met at the Taravana retreat, which for the audience was this wonderful physician wellbeing retreat that we went on. But I didn't put two and two together until I saw you sitting up there on this panel and then you launched into your story and my mind just exploded twofold. One, because I was like, oh, that's that guy that I've heard about. And then two, the stuff that you were saying was just so deep and profound and you just like casually dropped all these truth bombs. So anyway, I was like, I have to get Matthew onto the podcast. So I'm so glad you're here.
Can I just keep that so I can hype myself up sometime when I'm not feeling so deep and profound? It's good. No pressure. All right, let's do it. Let the profundity begin.
You are a physician. Tell us about your path to medicine and your physician life before the accident.
Yeah, so I had a non-traditional path. I was actually an art and philosophy major. I'd never taken a science class in my entire life, except for maybe geology. And My dad was a doctor, and so I actually didn't want to be a doctor. After college, I hopped in a car and drove across the country. I lived in Wyoming for several years, and I lived in the mountains and was living out of the back of a car, living out of a hostel, and generally just being in the mountains and being in nature. And that's always been something extremely important to me. But about three years in, I had an injury, nothing serious. Too crazy, just blew out a knee, but it was enough for me to pause and break the momentum of the life I was living then.
And funny enough, I was at that time working as a maid in a hostel, and my coworker was this radical anarchist and handed me this book on anarchy. And there's a lot that you can take with a grain of salt, but one of the fundamental principles that's always stuck with me is
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