Artwork Credit: Sam Lopez
Image Credit: @Jlocarpediem

How Punk Saved My Life
JLoCarpeDiem

“During my first two years of medical school, I had a small number of classmates who would listen to The Clash while toiling in their basic research labs in the early days of gene-sequencing: Flipper, The Mutants, X, Black Flag, Operation Ivy, Rancid, were all introduced to me by guys that also went on to kill it in science! We would hang in labs overlooking Golden Gate Park and much of The City studying to these same jams, and after midterms and exams, head out to catch all of these fellow PUNKS in small venues, like Dead Kennedys at Mabuhay Gardens or The Mutants at the I-Beam.
The pit over time was a strangely calming experience, a familiar physical violence I had known all too well, yet safe! “Hugs instead of slugs when you crashed to the floor!” I found this energizing, and it made me feel ALIVE!
We thrived with ever-changing music/art/dancing styles, where we lived, how we lived; the guiding light always being: QUESTION EVERYTHING! Question authority, question what a career means, question what will make you happy because what I saw in ‘medical professionals’ even at this ‘high caliber’ school that attracted ‘the best of the best’ was loads of self-medication, unhappiness, consumerism, and if you escaped academia, a life-sucking monotony working for a big ‘Not-for-profit- hospital system…if you were lucky. I distinctly remember one interaction: A group of UCSF medical school classmates happened by on the sidewalk outside of Club DNA. One of them took me aside and asked me, “Why do you hang out with these people?” I immediately thought, “Because we don’t want to be you, I don’t want to end up like the gods of medicine we admire ‘on the hill’ AND ‘we are going to change the world.”
In the late ’80s/early ’90s, trauma surgery was coming onto its own. Life-saving surgeries were being performed in the emergency rooms at countless University Medical Centers. Wild stuff like opening the chest and keeping the heart (and person) alive by squeezing it between your hands while swiftly fixing that hole in the heart, then up to the OR; or also brought down to the ED: a quick “six-pack” of quarter size holes in your skull as a growing clot tries to squeeze the brainstem to death… a literal race of minutes.
UCSF had a small group of “crazy guys,” the Interventional Radiologists, who performed imaging procedures on very unstable patients before surgery: blockages in the liver and the kidney. And out of the ED, blood vessels either busted open or completely blocked off, all later to be cured or “fixed” by “open surgery.” These ‘IR cowboys’ would frequently literally fix the problem they came to study…mainly out of necessity on unstable patients who were not going to make it to the OR…sometimes buying enough time for the liver, kidney, and heart to heal and delaying surgery for a later date, increasingly avoiding it altogether.
Things rapidly evolved over several years at a handful of progressive trauma centers across the country. (UC San Francisco, Oregon Health Sciences University, University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center/Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Cook County). IR was directed to cases unlikely to survive anyway or after a ‘mistake’ trip to the OR. IR’s charge changed, becoming the space for performing a life-saving operation or ‘procedure’ on at-risk patients. We stopped massive, rapid bleeding, with the main tools being a big ass needle the size used when you donate blood, a flimsy wire the size of smaller piano wires, and a small hollow tube about the size of a number two pencil lead. I had finally found my place in medicine, being amongst a group of small ‘oddballs,’ who didn’t even fit in our “home’ Department of Radiology Sciences, who didn’t follow the rules, whose main tool was out-of-the-box MacGyvering what little tools we did have and our constantly evolving algorithms…many under a literal life-or-death very soon time pressure. This encompassed everything punk for me, especially the ability of my DIY skills to repeatedly save a life or “do a first in medicine’… of course, only known after the fact and driven by necessity and NEVER SAY DIE! PUNKDOM…”