Op-Ed: As a doctor on 'MASH,' Hawkeye showed me how to get through this war on the coronavirus (via latimesopinion)
In our “Dispatches From the Pandemic” series, we bring you personal stories from people whose lives have been drastically altered by COVID-19.Hawkeye taught us that when your world is disintegrating, it is not only possible but utterly necessary to crack a joke — to create a counterpoint to what would otherwise be overwhelming.
In his oscillations between laughter and gut-wrenching anguish, I recognized a shadow version of myself. He planted the seed of the idea that I would become a doctor. From the first day I wore my white coat, I used humor as a grenade to lob at situations that were too awful for words, startling patients and families into laughter in ways that would have made Hawkeye proud. I channeled Hawkeye’s anger, raging bitterly at a broken system and colleagues who cared more for textbooks than for patients. But I didn’t always know how to cope with that rage. As impossible as it sounds, I hadn’t known that Hawkeye has a nervous breakdown before the war ends; I didn’t catch the final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” until I was already a physician. I wasn’t sure how to interpret this development in the context of my devotion to him, except that laughter alone was not enough. Now, in this summer like no other, I’m watching my children pick chokecherries and skip rocks, the COVID curve in much of Canada momentarily flattened by leadership and luck.. When we Zoom, some are crying. One in New Jersey lost her mother, then her best friend. Another in California has left practice. An intensivist in Baltimore says she is hanging by a thread. Sentiments shared by nurses, orderlies, everyone. There are field hospitals,and a shocking amount of incompetence from central command — like the fools on the telephone line in Seoul that Col. Potter used to shake his fist at, utterly disconnected from life on the ground.So why would someone make a comedy about it? The answer comes to me as my kids and I watch “MASH” in the TV’s flickering light, safe in our cabin, the shells falling somewhere else right now. Humor is just shorthand for hope, a gamble we’ll live long enough to hear the punchline, whether in the face of hardship or the pathologic indifference to suffering that sows the seeds for war in the first place. And in a war of ideology, humor correlates to the most important thing of all: resistance. That’s my blueprint for survival, the one Hawkeye taught me so many years ago. Be brave. Be kind. Be funny, because humor shines a powerful light on hypocrisy and absurdity while reminding us we are tough, and still alive. Be principled. Be ready to break down and get put back together again. Build a chain-link fence around love and faith in the things you still believe in, then resist, resist, resist, and don’t stop until Goodbye, Farewell and Amen. There is no other way to make it through this war.Jillian Horton is an internist in Canada and author of the forthcoming memoir “We Are All Perfectly Fine.” @jillianhortonMD
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