Sometimes a job is just a way to make a living, but for our storytellers it is much more than that. In this week’s episode, our stories are about the undeniable draw to a career.
Part 1: When pediatric oncologist Sam Blackman gets called for a consult by the obstetrics department, he’s convinced they have the wrong number.
Sam Blackman is a physician-scientist and pediatric oncologist. He's the founder and chief medical officer of Day One Biopharmaceuticals, a company focused on drug development for childhood cancers. He's an avid storyteller, baker of bread, and recently returned from a trek to Everest Base Camp. Sam lives on Orcas Island with his wife and daughter.
Part 2: After 25 years of teaching, Matthew Dicks questions whether or not he should still be a teacher.
Matthew Dicks is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, Something Missing and Unexpectedly, Milo, The Perfect Comeback of Caroline Jacobs, Twenty-one Truths About Love, The Other Mother, and the nonfiction title Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Art of Storytelling. His novels have been translated into more than 25 languages worldwide. He is an advice columnist for Slate magazine and the humor columnist for Seasons magazine.
When not hunched over a computer screen, he fills his days as an elementary school teacher, storyteller, blogger, wedding DJ, minister, and storytelling and speaking consultant. He has been teaching for 21 years and is a former West Hartford Teacher of the Year and a finalist for Connecticut Teacher of the Year.
Matthew is a record 56-time Moth StorySLAM champion and 9-time GrandSLAM champion whose stories have been featured on their nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour and their weekly podcast. He has performed for audiences around the globe.
Matthew is also the founder and creative director of Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization that produces shows throughout New England. He teaches storytelling and public speaking throughout the world to individuals, corporations, school districts, hospitals, universities, and more.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
I knock on wood all the time, compulsively. It’s ridiculous. And it’s ridiculous because I'm a scientist and there is no scientific proof for knocking on wood. There’s never been a randomized, placebo‑controlled, double‑blind trial of knocking on wood. So why do I do it?
I do it because I'm a physician as well, and physicians are ridiculously superstitious. It’s the reason why— true. It’s the reason why, and you know this in the back, you never say when you're on call, “Ooh, it’s quiet tonight.”
It’s the reason that when I do a bone marrow biopsy, I always turn the needle first to the right exactly three times and then to the left exactly three times.
Sam Blackman shares his story at the Jewelbox Theater in Seattle in July 2022 . Photo by Elizar Mercado.
I had this senior resident once, and he told me that when he would go to bed at night in his call room, he would take the pager off his waistband and he’d stand it upright on the table next to his bed. Because if the pager was standing upright, it would think that he was still working, but if he laid the pager down on its side, it would know that he was sleeping and go off.
Now, despite my proclivity for magical thinking, I am actually not religious, not spiritual. I used to be deeply religious but 24 years of education beat all that out of me. I am devoutly reductionist, but I am ridiculously superstitious.
When I was a first year pediatric oncology fellow, there were always two superstitions that I abided by. The first was never, ever say the ‘C’ word, ‘cured’, because the cancer gods would hear you and they would smite your patient down.
The second was never, ever, ever put on your coat before 5:00 on a Friday because, if you do, the cancer gods will see you and you will get called. And we all know that the worst cases come in on a Friday.
This particular Friday was the dead of winter. I was super tired. I had managed to wrap up my work. I’d managed to wrap up the day. I had signed out to the weekend fellow on call. I was anxious to get home because it was dark in Boston. I wanted to get home and see my wife.
I put on my coat and I headed towards the door, and my pager goes off. And I go, sigh, and I look back at the clock and it’s 4:30.
I trudge over to the phone and I look at my pager, and I had this glimmer of hope just for a moment because the prefix on the number is not from the cancer center and it’s not from the children’s hospital.
So I call and I was elated because the person who answered said it was from the adult hospital across the street. And this woman goes, “Is this the oncologist on call?” I had this wonderful moment thinking they called the wrong person.
And I said, “Yes?”
And they said, “We need you to come across the street. We’ve got a consult for you.”
And I said, “No, I’m the pediatric oncologist on call. I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
And they said, “No, no. No, we’re pretty sure we’ve got the right person.”
And I said, “But I know your hospital doesn’t have a pediatric floor. Let me explain to you the concept of pediatric oncology.”
And she goes, “No, no, no. We really want you to come over.”
And I said, “I don’t understand why. Where are you calling from?”
She goes, “I’m calling from the obstetrical unit.”
Sam Blackman shares his story at the Jewelbox Theater in Seattle in July 2022 . Photo by Elizar Mercado.
I said, “No, really. Let me explain this whole pediatric oncology thing. There’s a child outside and the child has cancer and then I come and fix it.”
And she goes, “Listen, you really need to come over.”
So I go across the street, I follow the instructions that she gave me, and it leads me to the Maternal Fetal Medicine unit. Somebody meets me there and they walk me back into this dark room with all these glowing monitors and they escort me to this radiologist.
The radiologist goes, “Oh, here’s your patient,” and points to this gray, blobby thing on his bank of monitors.
And I go, “What am I looking at?”
He goes, “You're looking at a fetal MRI. This is a 35-week-old fetus inside of its mother, and you need to fix that,” and points to this white spot in the middle of the gray blobby thing.
I said, “What is it?”
And he goes, “Well, we were hoping you could tell us.”
And I said, “Well, we probably need to get the patient out for me to do that.”
And they said, “Great. When do you want them to come out?”
I was terrified, absolutely terrified because I’d never done this before.
So I take the scan and I go back to my radiologist at the children’s hospital and I say, “What am I looking at here?”
They looked at the scans and he said, “Well, this is a fetus with a tumor next to its spine.”
I said, “Have you seen that before?”
And he goes, “No.”
And he said, “Regardless, you need to do something about this because this tumor is invading the spinal canal and pressing on the spinal cord, and this child is going to be paralyzed from the waist down, if not worse.”
So I go and I call my attending who is the physician who supervises me and helps me figure out what to do and, importantly, helps me figure out what not to do.
I call her up and I say, “Hey, what do you do for a fetus with a spinal cord tumor?”
And she goes, “Did you put your coat on before 5:00?” No, she actually said, “I don’t know. What do you do for a fetus with a spinal cord tumor?”
And I said, “No, no, no. What do you do for a fetus with a spinal cord tumor? I'm asking you that question.”
She goes, “I'm telling you, I don’t know what you do.” She goes, “But you better spend the weekend figuring it out.”
So I go home completely terror-stricken and I sit down at my computer at home and I get up Google. Because when you’ve been doing this for only ten months, it’s as good as anything else, you know, fetal paraspinal tumor.
It turns out that there is a world literature on fetal paraspinal tumors that happens to be mostly in Japanese. So, Google Translate, and it’s pretty straightforward what you do to fix these things. Roughly translating from the Japanese, take the baby out, diagnose tumor, give chemotherapy.
Sam Blackman shares his story at the Jewelbox Theater in Seattle in July 2022 . Photo by Elizar Mercado.
So, harder doing new things, so I spend the entire weekend, what was one of the longest weekends of my first year fellowship, coordinating amongst ten different hospital services because we need to get the baby delivered. We need to get them transferred over to the children’s hospital. We need to get them stabilized in the NICU. We need to get an operating room arranged. We need an anesthesiologist willing to anesthetize a one‑day‑old child. We need to be able to biopsy this baby. We need to have a pathologist to be able to read the biopsy. We have to be able to give chemotherapy in the neonatal intensive care unit, and all of this takes coordinating.
I spent the whole weekend doing this. I'm deliriously tired. And Monday morning rolls around and I go in to our neonatal ICU and I see this baby.
What I see is incredibly worrisome because his legs were completely flexed at the hip to the point where his feet are back by his ears, because he was in breech position and he had no muscle tone from the tumor pressing on his spine.
I tickle his feet and he doesn’t do anything. I'm now at this point incredibly worried that we were too late, that this child is in fact going to be paralyzed.
We take him to the operating room and put a central line in his chest so that we can give chemotherapy. We flip him over and the surgeon does a fine needle aspirate biopsy. He takes a tiny little piece of the tumor.
And I have to do bone marrow biopsies on this child and I've got a needle that’s bigger than the child is wide.
We do all of these and I take the samples to the pathologist. She goes, “Hey, listen, there’s only like three cells here. I don’t know if I can really tell you what’s going on. Listen, you better do your best because nobody’s invented Google Microscope yet, and we really need to figure this out.”
And she goes, “I think it’s neuroblastoma.”
So I said, “Great,” and we call it Stage 3 neuroblastoma.
I go back and we make up some chemotherapy – I mean, we don’t make up the chemotherapy. We sort of approximate the chemotherapy that we’re going to do. Then I take the whole treatment plan and I go meet the parents for the first time, who were, as you can imagine, absolutely terrified. New parents, first baby.
And, along the way, I’m talking to them, I learn that the dad’s an architect and the mom is a producer for a radio show on NPR. And I’m thinking, “Oh, my God, I better not fuck this up or else Terry Gross is going to be talking about me five years from now.”
And we make all these adjustments in chemotherapy. We give him his first cycle of chemotherapy right there in the neonatal intensive care unit and it goes reasonably well.
We get him out of the hospital and we bring him back three or four weeks later, give him another cycle and then we scan him. And his tumor shrank. And then he does pretty well. We give him a couple more cycles and then his tumor shrank even more. By the end of four cycles, his tumor was completely gone.
The parents are, of course, elated. They think that I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. “It’s a miracle,” they say.
But I look at this child and he’s still flexed at the hip and I tickle his feet and they still don’t move, and I don’t think it’s a miracle. I mean, yeah, the tumor shrank, but that’s chemo doing what chemo does. We won the battle, but we lost the war.
Part of what makes this child a child is probably never going to come back. And the tumor, after it’s gone, it means my job is mostly done. The other specialties come in to take responsibility, neurology to coordinate his care and urology to deal with the fact that he’s got no bladder tone, and physical therapy and occupational therapy, and all of the other specialists.
I see him every three months to make sure his tumor doesn’t come back and to read his scans, and then every six months and then once a year, and then it just sort of fades away into the distance.
Sam Blackman holding patient Henry in May 2006. Photo courtesy of Sam Blackman.
It is in one of those outyears that I was doing a big fundraiser for the pediatric oncology program, a big bike ride. I was holding a fundraiser in my backyard and the parents of this child come to my fundraiser.
I'm thrilled. I haven’t seen them in a long time. Big hugs. “How are you? How’s Henry?”
“He’s great.”
“I wish you had brought him. I would’ve loved to have seen him.”
And they say, “Well, we did. He’s here.”
And I'm looking around for a little wheelchair, which I don’t see.
I said, “Well, where is he?”
They point and they go, “He’s right there.”
I turn and he walks. He has little crutches but I see him, and he walks. And for the first time in I don’t even know how many years, the reductionist lens that I've been viewing everything through has a little cloudy part in it. Because the very first words that come into my mind are, “It’s a miracle.”
Now, this was 20 years ago. Today, I get Christmas cards from a family of a little boy who walks, who rides a bike, who plays lacrosse, who’s going to walk across the stage to get his high school diploma soon, who maybe one day is going to go to college.
And I think about this because it’s a story for me that, when I tell it, it still brings a tear to the corner of my eye. It’s a story of a time when I think I caught a glimpse of a miracle. A time where I felt like I won the battle and, hopefully, won the war. Knock on wood.
Part 2
I'm standing in front of my fifth-grade classroom. It’s Tuesday morning. It’s 12:25. I know this not because I've looked at the clock but because Duncan’s legs are not under his desk anymore. They are shifted to the right and are facing the door and he is vibrating.
I'm surprised that Duncan can do this because he can't actually read an analog clock and he rarely vibrates for anything in life, but he knows that it’s five minutes before recess. Because the only way he reads an analog clock is two things, it is it’s not recess and it is recess. That’s how he reads the clock. And he knows it’s almost recess and he is excited.
Matthew Dicks shares his story at New City Brewery in Easthampton, MA in August 2022. Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
I'm really not complaining about his excitement because it’s a Tuesday at about 12:30, and this is a standing meeting that I have every Tuesday with my business partner. It turns out that from 12:30 to 1:00 I am supposed to be free, and so I jump on a Zoom with my business partner and we have a 30‑minute conversation because it’s the only 30 minutes I have during the entire week for him.
It’s not going to matter if Duncan gets out of the door, though, because nothing ever happens at 12:30 in my room.
I've got Latavia, and before Latavia goes to recess, she has to use the bathroom, which kind of makes sense, except she brings Jamie and Alice with her to a single‑occupancy restroom. They’re going to just stand outside the door and wait for Latavia, but I can't tell them to go outside because, if I do, they will say they need to use the bathroom. And I know after 25 years of teaching that I cannot tell a 10-year-old girl that she can’t use the bathroom, because nothing good happens when you do something like that.
There’s also David who was going to plow over everyone to the door, so I'm going to have to send David back to his seat and tell him to think about his decisions for a while before he goes outside.
And I've got a student named Yvette who treats recess like summiting Everest. She packs everything up. She’s got a million things on her back before she goes out for 30 minutes on the playground.
So it takes forever to get the kids out the door and, by the time they’re out the door, it’s 12:40.
And so I sit down and I click on Zoom and my business partner, Joey, pops up. I apologize for being late again and he laughs at me. But then we begin arguing. It’s an argument we’ve been having for a long time.
Joey tells me, “You need to quit teaching.”
Usually, Joey’s argument is financial. He says, “You could be making a lot more money if you just did this business and stop teaching,” and he’s not wrong. My money people tell me that, although technically you do get paid to go to work and teach, you’re actually losing money every single day you go to work and teach. You could be making more money somewhere else. That is absolutely true.
Sometimes, Joey uses my kids against me. He tells me, “You got a 13‑year‑old and a 10‑year‑old and, theoretically, they will be in college someday, so you need a pile of money or they will be in debt for the rest of their lives or you will be in debt for the rest of your life. So you should be piling up money now. And that’s also true.
Sometimes, Joey approaches me from an ethical angle. He says, “Listen, you’ve been teaching for 25 years. You have put in all of your time. You deserve to go take care of yourself now. You’ve done kids for 25 years. Now, do yourself.” And that is true too.
All of these things work on me a little bit every day but, today, Joey’s argument is different. Joey says to me, “You need to stop teaching because you’re going to get killed someday.”
Joey is Canadian and it is three days after the Uvalde massacre. And so for Joey in Canada, he lives there, the violence that happens in schools makes even less sense for him than it does for me.
I understand what he's saying too. I live 15 minutes from Newtown and I will never forget the day I was teaching when that happened. And I was student teaching in a classroom on the day the Columbine massacre happened. And all of the terrible things in between those, I’ve been there for every one of them.
And he is right. I worry about these things. My wife teaches kindergarten and I have two kids in public schools. All four of us go to four different schools every morning. And every day, I think about what is each one of us going to step into on this day.
I know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever experience anything like those poor people did in Uvalde, but I also know that that’s what they were thinking when they went into their school that day.
So I stare at the Zoom screen, staring at my friend Joey wondering what am I supposed to say to this?
And then I see my little picture-in-picture, I see my face, and I see over my shoulder the answer, the thing I need to tell Joey. I see over my shoulder a cage. It’s a cage the size of a fifth grader hanging from the ceiling of my classroom.
About three years ago, a girl named Catherine, one of my students, said, “What do you want for your birthday, Mr. Dicks?”
And I always say the same thing. I say, “I want you to work hard and be kind,” which she always was.
And she says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what do you really want?”
And I said, “Actually, Catherine, I have everything I need. I don’t need anything from you.”
And she says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shut up. Tell me what you really want.”
And I said, “Fine. I want a cage so I can stick annoying kids like you into that cage when you annoy me like this.”
So three days later, she brought in a cage. It’s made of twine and rope. It’s got hoops on the top and the bottom and it’s large enough for me to drop over any fifth grader who annoys me at any time in the school day. It hangs behind my desk and I use it often.
Matthew Dicks shares his story at New City Brewery in Easthampton, MA in August 2022. Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
But I look through the bars of that cage to a shelf right behind it. There’s a telescope on the shelf. And like so many of the objects in my classroom, every one of them just about transports me back to a different time.
I see that telescope and I'm reminded about teaching third graders about 15 years ago. I'm getting ready to teach a unit on the sun, moon, and earth, and I believe in incentivizing kids. I think the mistake that teachers make is they assume that kids want to learn, because most of them used to be kids who wanted to learn, but I was not one of those kids. So my assumption is no one ever wants to hear from me and no one wants to learn anything, so I have to find a way to get them to learn.
And so when I'm teaching the sun, the moon, and the earth, I tell the kids, “Listen, if you do a great job at the end of this unit, we’re going to go into the backyard of one of your homes and we’re going to have stargazing night. I'm going to have a telescope and we’re going to do s’mores and I'm going to take out my time machine and show it to you.
And because third graders are naïve and stupid and because I am extremely good at lying to children and getting them to believe me, they believe I have a time machine.
I tell them, “It’s not like a DeLorean. You're not going to get into it. And you won't be able to see the future because the future hasn’t happened yet. But I swear to you, I have a time machine that will bring us to the past.”
And they say, “Are we going to see dinosaurs and Abraham Lincoln?”
I say, “Don’t ask. I'm not really sure what we’ll see in the past, but we’re going to see something.”
And they believe me and they work like hell. They learn the difference between revolutions and rotations, which some of you still don’t know right now. They can tell me about the phases of the moon and why eclipses happen. They can tell me the distance from the earth to the sun, a number that I know that you don’t but they do. They’ve got all of that by the end of the unit. They know how the sun, the moon, and the earth interact.
And so stargazing night comes in the back of Kelly Hire’s home, a big lawn with a firepit and the fire is going. We take out the telescope and it’s a good one. You look into it and you can see the craters of the moon and their minds are blown. They can't believe they can see another world with that clarity.
So they draw pictures of what they see and, eventually, I tell the parents, “Get the s’mores ready. I’ll be back in a minute.” And I tell all the kids to go over to a side field with me for the time machine.
I tell them to lie down on the grass and spread out and I tell them they need to be very still and they have to close their eyes. They cannot open their eyes until I tell them to or I will take that time machine and never show it to them. So they all closed their eyes.
And they’re shivering. They’re trembling like Duncan before recess. They are vibrating in the grass. I just wait a minute and I watch these 20 kids, they’re so excited. And then I say, “Open your eyes.”
Matthew Dicks shares his story at New City Brewery in Easthampton, MA in August 2022. Photo by Kimberly Vadelnieks and Ben Kalama.
And I say, “Look up at the stars. The stars that you're seeing tonight, the light that you see is millions of years old. Some of those stars that we’re looking at right now, they don’t exist anymore. It’s just the light that has taken this long to get to us on this night so we can see it. It’s a time machine. It lets you see into the past.
And they’re all quiet for a minute. Then these two girls, the coolest girls in my class, they sit up and they look at me with such disdain. They shake their heads the way high school girls used to shake their heads at me when I asked for dates. And then they stand up and they just walk away without a word.
Then one by one, every one of those kids stands up, some of their looks are disgust, some of them are disappointment, and some of them are real honest‑to‑goodness hatred for their teacher.
But without saying a word, every one of them, even the nerds, get up and they walk away to the firepit, leaving me alone in that field.
I pull myself together. I go over to the firepit because I'm getting a s’more. I get in line behind the kids and one of the parents sees me and says, “Mr. Dicks, you want a s’more?”
And the kid in the back of the line, a boy named Charlie, says, “He doesn’t need a s’more. He has a time machine.”
I stare at that telescope through the bars of Catherine’s fifth grade cage and all of that comes back to me. And then I look at Joey on that Zoom screen and I have my answer. I know why I am doing what I do. It is because Charlie in that class will be in my heart forever. And Catherine, even if this cage sometimes gets taken away by some awful administrator, will still be with me. And even vibrating Duncan and Latavia and her bathroom friends, and Yvette and her backpack of toys, and David running over everybody in the class, all of those kids and the hundreds of kids I've taught over 25 years, they are why I walk into a school every day despite the struggle and the fear and the hardship.
I’m a business person who’s building something with my friend, Joey, which someday I hope produces riches, but I already have riches every day because I'm a teacher first. Thank you.