The Makeover
By David E McCarty MD, FAASM (but you can call me Dave)
Himself, in uniform…
…photo-bombing Brother Edgar, sometime before Covidity changed everything…
When I said in the credits to our first podcast episode that my bowtie functioned as a time portal, I wasn’t joking.
I remember when I picked up the hand-knotted bowtie habit, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2014. I remember my slackfaced expression, whilst trying to ape the cartoon dance maneuvers of the knotting, printed from the interwebs, taped to the corner of my mirror.
Woody Guthrie famously said of his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Along those lines, I think the cartoon caption underneath the hand-knotted bowtie is this: This Machine Resurrects Ghosts.
A Most Unusual Machine
Or at the very least: Old-Fashioned Narratives. Sir William Osler. Bill Nye, the Science Guy. The 11th iteration of Doctor Who, as interpreted by the miraculous Matt Smith.
THE BOWTIE
This Machine Resurrects Ghosts
And I remember the smiles.
The Hand-Knotted Bowtie is a smile-magnet.
Once, whilst I was stopping at Safeway on the way home from work, a stranger stopped me, specifically to thank me for “dressing up,” with a dazed and weary smile.
I mean.
It IS Boulder, but still…
It was weird and magical.
My patients began to expect it. The Bowtie, I mean.
I began to receive bowties as gifts.
Perhaps fittingly, the only time I ever stooped to the theatricality of a clip-on bowtie (“Heaven Forfend!” I would say, in mock horror) was for Halloween, when I wore the officially-licensed Dr. Who bowtie, spraying my hair in a preposterous comb-over whilst buzzing my officially-licensed Sonic Screwdriver.
I’m pretty sure nobody noticed I was in costume.
So it went, all the way through Covidity. All the way through tele-medicine, when it didn’t matter that my bottom half was yoga pants and slippers.
The top half was still bowtied and tweed. The top half was still a time portal.
And then I retired, to Write My Book.
If you ask anybody who has successfully written a book--
[not that the book itself has to be a success mind you—just that the process of conception, organization, commitment, creation, editing, and, finally, publication has been successfully completed]
--they will tell you it’s a transformative experience. A chrysalis. A birthing. The process of Empowered Sleep Apnea (the book) took about 18 months from start to finish, and when I crawled out from my underground bunker, blinking stupidly at the sun gripping our Beautiful Blue Book like a talisman, the bowties suddenly felt like white socks with black shoes.
The bowties felt out of place.
The bowties felt like Someone Else’s Stuff.
Whatever we wear every day is our costume. Whatever we leave behind is our art. A major component of the Empowered Sleep Apnea project was the realization that the presentation is as important as the material.
Let me be clear: by the time I retired from clinical medicine, I was quite clear on the material that individual patients needed to be taught. I knew the exact knowledge to disseminate, and the timing within the journey it needed to be given, for it to have the best effect. I had seen thousands of patients, one by one, achieve agency and empowerment within their diagnosis, and watched with admiration as they set themselves free.
“Whatever we wear every day is our costume. Whatever we leave behind is our art.”
The problem I discovered: putting this knowledge into an airtight little textbook somehow turned it into something ugly. It felt like a tax manual. It felt like stereo instructions. Injecting humor somehow made it even worse, like a creepy smile on a man holding a drill.
All Work and No Play…
It wasn’t until Ellen and I botched Episode 2 for the second time that the two of us realized the critical point: if it was going to work at all, our adventure had to be FUN. But the fun had to be more than just pasting jokes onto the surface.
It had to be bigger than fun—it had to bring people to a place in their minds where somehow, the joyful reception of new information is effortless. We realized that this place required a different emotional landscape, one that couldn’t be found in doctor’s offices, tri-fold handouts, and the language of risk management.
It was at that point that both of us realized that the Magic was in the Map that I’d drawn, kind of at the last minute, as a thowaway talking point for Episode 1.
It was like a bolt of lightning: The Magic was in the Adventure itself! It strikes me now that perhaps the bowties felt foreign because they were a clinging reminder of a system I had to leave behind.
A time-portal that had served its purpose.
So, should you see me on the street, weep not for the absence of that beautiful nuchal anachronism. The magic it represents is still there.
All of this, as usual, is more buildup for another cartoon, as we follow Claudio and Kate into their new Adventure into the unexplored territory of the heart.
Will we recognize ourselves, when we follow our heart? Will we recognize each other? What will we allow ourselves to become? What narratives will we represent?
With that, here’s a little something I’m calling: THE MAKEOVER.
Happy Sunday, Life Fans!
