Meeting Dr. Lamb

Ben Ashby Meeting Dr. Lamb

I wasn’t sure what to make of Dr. Lamb when we first met. He had a clunky face and a tall, jerky frame. His deep brown eyes obscured his pupils, pinpoints behind small wire-frame glasses that clung to his nose. His thick black hair fell into messy sideburns that travelled just a bit too far down his cheeks. Dr. Lamb greeted me with a big wave and slow, lisp-filled speech. He laughed at his own corny jokes with a sort of high-pitched shout. I saw a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet hanging from the wall. A golden plaque on his door read “Jackson Lamb, D.O., Psychiatrist”. I decided that Dr. Lamb was a work of compensation, a man retelling his life after having finally made it somewhere. I was unimpressed, and it showed. My normally timid, deferring clinical demeanor became loud and confident. I found myself trying to finish his sentences early, and often being right. I sat along the wall and watched Dr. Lamb conduct his first interview of the morning. The girl was in all black and angry. She was hurting herself, regularly skipping school, and trying a lot of drugs. Her mom was getting desperate; they fought all the time. I imagined myself as the psychiatrist, finding a medicine to tone down the child’s behaviors and giving clever parenting tips to her mom. I would be cordial, but firm. Instead, Dr. Lamb was energetic and friendly, in an awkward sort of way. He nodded enthusiastically to their every answer. He seemed to completely ignore the family dynamic and push forward with unearned optimism. About twenty minutes into the interview, the girl smiled. By the end of the appointment, she had said thank you to her mom. They left with a plan, medicine, and confidence. On the way out, the girl turned and asked, “Do you have a motorcycle?” Dr. Lamb chuckled, “Oh no, it’s a moped! Better for the environment, and still quite zippy if you’re going downhill. My wife and I share it; purple wasn’t necessarily the color I would have picked.” The family laughed again and left. The next girl we saw had tried to commit suicide the day before. She lay curled on the couch, hardly talking. I felt sadness push its way into every

corner of the room. Instinctively, I walked through the questions I’d have to ask to see if she would be hospitalized: What kept her from killing herself ? Was she thinking about doing it today? Did she have a plan to try again? “Oh no!” Dr. Lamb sounded almost childlike in his disappointment. The girl looked up, for the first time in the interview. He smiled at her, “I’m glad you’re still here.” She looked away, but I felt her posture change, infinitesimally. She began speaking in sentences instead of in words. By the end of the interview, she was sitting up, albeit slouched over and crying. He let her go home, with a different kind of plan. She got better. That first week, I was continually confused by Dr. Lamb. He seemed spacey and his approach often didn’t make sense. He smiled when I would frown. He left pauses where I would have spoken with authority. He gave gangly high fives to kids I thought needed restraints. I kept expecting an appointment to go wrong, but they never did. Every patient seemed in a better place, and better prepared for the future by the end of their thirty minutes. It felt as if we were in the same room, but seeing a different doctor. Later in the week, Dr. Lamb hosted our medical school’s weekly continuing education session. At one point, the discussion veered away from pure psychiatry into the effects of alcohol on the body’s response to insulin. Eventually, we landed in an obscure conversation of receptors and complex endocrine mechanisms. After each medical student, fresh from taking the most difficult and expansive test of their future career, had exhausted their knowledge base, one turned to Dr. Lamb and asked, “Maybe the only actual doctor in the room knows?” We all expected him to wave a hand and move on, as other physicians always did when asked about non-clinical minutiae. At least a decade out from this same test and dedicated to practicing in another field, Dr. Lamb drew out the feedback pathway we’d been stuck on and gently explained what was going on. His unexpected response was met with open mouths and a smattering of applause. Dr. Lamb chuckled, gave a small bow, and sat back down. After class, many of my friends whispered in disbelief, “He’s a D.O.?” I wondered if I had gone to the wrong type of medical school.

Over time, I learned who Dr. Lamb was. He was a depression killer; a puppy in wolf ’s clothing, relentlessly hopping and licking and yapping at stubborn, hurting teenagers until eventually, they cracked. He knew when to sit with someone in their suffering and not say a word. He knew when to push for a laugh. His dark eyes, without the twinkle I had come to require in my imagining of intelligence, absorbed more pain in a day than I could handle in a lifetime. His messy hair and bouncing movements were a base upon which near-absolute trust was built within minutes. An abundance of hope shone through his posture, his smile, his words, and his pauses. He was brilliant and humble. He was good. When we first met, I had wondered if he should be a doctor at all. Now, I wondered how I could ever become a doctor like him.