M ost psychiatrists aren’t lacing up their basketball shoes during business hours.
Then again this wasn’t your average situation.
As part of the painstaking process of transferring my medical license after making aliyah I suddenly found myself working for a stretch in the Wild West of psychiatric hospitals. Back in the US I’d grown accustomed to rounding on all the patients with a multidisciplinary team. Here though there was only one nurse for the whole unit and she was way too busy for anything besides emergencies. Back in the US I’d seen my patients in a treatment room overlooking a serene lake. Here our patients were regularly admitted in handcuffs and interviewed chained to their beds. Back in the US I’d gone to work each day wearing a suit. Here I hadn’t seen a doc with a tie in months.
Convention was out the window and I was forced to bring an open mind to work each day. So when my patient Gil challenged me to a game of one-on-one outside on the hospital’s basketball court I did the natural thing and brought my old Nikes out of retirement. Lacing up my shoes evoked some nice nostalgia of my glory days back in college. But today the stakes were a bit different.
