Love in Practice with Anthony Williams, MD
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What does the episode introduction reveal about the theme of love in practice?
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You're listening to the Nocturnists, stories from the world of medicine. I'm Emily Silverman. As clinicians, it can be tough to snap out of medical mode when our loved ones get sick. Our brains get wired a certain way. wired toward diagnosis and treatment and problem solving and action. But sometimes that's not what our loved ones need. Sometimes a pause, a breath. And a listening ear is just what the doctor ordered. In today's episode, Dr. Anthony Williams talks about the lessons he learned and unlearned about how to handle life's hardest challenges, and how this all came to a head when his partner developed a mysterious chronic disease. In the conversation that follows, Anthony and I talk about uncertainty in medicine, masculinity as it pertains to caregiving, and how a simple change in language can dramatically shift one's mindset.
Anthony is a MedPeds hospitalist at Health Partners who splits his clinical time between Regions and Children's Minnesota. He's an Associate Program Director of the MedPeeds Residency Program at the University of Minnesota and an associate director for the Center for the Art of Medicine. Let's listen to Anthony telling his story live in Minnesota in 2023. It's called Love in Practice.
It is complete chaos in this gym right now. Kids are slipping and sliding all over the dusty court, coaches are yelling, and the parents, the supposedly responsible adults here, are just up in the stands losing it. And even for a second grader, I am tiny. So my bar for success here is pretty low. Um I'm just trying to survive this YMCA basketball game. Now, my pregame lecture from my dad, uh who's also one of the coaches, centered around me uh shooting the ball more and being tough. Uh it is the third quarter, and I am busy failing spectacularly at both of these things. Um, when a kid from the other team comes out of nowhere and shoves me to the ground. Now, for good measure, this kid makes sure to take the time to stomp on me uh several times.
Times uh before running away. So I get up and I limp to the bench uh crying about my scraped knee and bruised elbow. And for the life of me, I cannot meet my dad's eyes as I tell him that I don't want to go back into the game. Now, he doesn't force me to, he doesn't make me go back in. Um, but in that moment I can feel his uh disappointment with me. So later that night at our family talk table, which is just our uh dinner table after the food gets cleared, my parents are sitting at either end, my younger sister's to my left, my older brother's across from me, and there is this pleasant aroma of spaghetti and garlic bread. Hanging in the air, but we all know that dinner ain't over until the analysis of the game is done.
So it's not long before my dad leans forward to rest his interlaced hands on the table. And I get a spike of anxiety at this because I know that it is time for the lessons that start at basketball, but always seem to generalize to the rest of life. So for my dad, it's Anthony, you need to be more aggressive and impose your will out there. When it's game time, you've got to figure out how to flip that switch and handle your business. And from my mom, it's everybody gets hurt sometimes and that's okay. But don't make yourself a target by announcing it to the world. Now the talk table is a huge part of our upbringing. It's where we learn how to survive street fights, how to interact with the police, and how to stay out of trouble with teachers.
And these are some of the crucial lessons that I lean heavily on to make it through med school and residency. But these are also the lessons that I carry into my marriage. So in 2016, my second year of residency, my partner starts having these episodes of unexplained hypoxia, which is just low oxygen in the body.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What does the episode introduction reveal about the theme of love in practice?
0:00–11:54
2
How does Anthony’s childhood basketball story illustrate early lessons about aggression and vulnerability?
11:54–28:01
3
What triggered the mysterious chronic illness in Anthony’s partner and how did they initially respond?
28:01–42:29