Houston's Hospital for All with Ricardo Nuila, MD
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What is the overall premise of The People’s Hospital and why is Ben Taub Hospital important?
Support for the nocturnist comes from the California Medical Association.
At the Nocturneist, we are careful to ensure that all stories comply with healthcare privacy laws. Details may have been changed to ensure patient confidentiality. All views expressed are those of the person speaking and not their employer.
You're listening to the Nocturnous Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. We all know that healthcare is broken. Some people support nationalized health care, others support Medicare for all or a public option. Others prefer to keep the federal government out of health care as much as possible and combine cash pay practices with insurance for catastrophic situations only. These philosophical differences are the source of much gridlock and antagonism in politics. And too often it seems like we're getting nowhere fast as healthcare costs continue to soar and the national life expectancy continues to sink. But today's guest works at a Safety Net hospital in Houston, Texas called Ben Tobb, whose unique business model of public healthcare that is local may serve as inspiration for those of us who believe healthcare is a human right.
Ricardo Nwila is a writer and hospitalist, and his debut book, The People's Hospital, Hope and Peril in American Medicine, is a love letter to Bentop Hospital. Filled with stories of its faculties, staff and patients, all mixed in with Ricardo's own experiences, growing up with a physician father, finding his way as a doctor himself, and listening to Wilco and Arcade Fire in the car on his way to work, which he mentions in his book, and you'll hear me mention at the top of the interview. And so much more. Ricardo is an associate professor of medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, where he directs the Humanities, Expression, and Arts Lab, also known as HEAL. His writing has been featured in the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, New England Journal of Medicine, and Best American Short Stories, and focuses on health disparities, health policy, and the connection between art and medicine.
My conversation with Ricardo covers a lot of ground, including the way that he was torn between writing and medicine early on in his career, the unusual history of Bentaub Hospital and its business model, the collision of political ideologies that occurs there, and the ways that we can work together across differences to put people over profits. But first, here's Ricardo, reading from the People's Hospital.
The rumor we heard was that patients arrived with hand drawn maps, or hospital marked like treasure. The stately Nigerian lady who responded, Yes, doctor, to everything, metastatic breast cancer. The boy with the black curly hair wearing red Converse All-Stars and a Judas Priest t-shirt that screamed Mexico City, acute lymphocytic leukemia. The grandmother with a sorry snagged in the guardrails, chest pain, real chest pain. Might need bypass. We stood at these patients' bedsides. We wrote down their histories. We said we were sorry for examining them with cold hands. We ordered blood tests, interpreted EKGs, scrolled through their CAT scans, we input diagnoses. We weren't just doctors. Among us were nurses, social workers, x-ray techs, the people who rode up and down the hallways in the middle of the night waxing the floors.
Some of us wore white coats with frayed sleeves and busted pockets, others tight fitting scrubs embroidered with our names. In our bad moments, we became tribal. We weren't we, we were ortho, medicine, plastics, the foray nurses. We only covered the units. More often though, the needs of our patients were so damn immediate, we found a way to work as one. We ran blood transfusions, heparin drips, a morphine pump when Norco didn't touch the pain. When COVID came, we gave oxygen together, one of us twisting the knob on the valve while the other inserted those tiny prongs into flared nostrils. We consulted one another when things looked dicey, surgery if we found boils, ID for antibiotics, and if anything looked remotely like a seizure, a twitch, a rolling of the eyes, we paged neurology overhead and
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the overall premise of The People’s Hospital and why is Ben Taub Hospital important?
0:00–6:25
2
How does Ricardo Nuila describe the day‑to‑day experience of caring for patients at Ben Taub?
6:25–40:37
3
What personal experiences shaped Ricardo’s decision to become a physician‑writer?
40:37–45:30
4
How did Ricardo balance his love of writing with a career in medicine?
45:30–45:58