
Chapter 07: Faith and a Loving Family Support a High-Stress Career
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Description
Dr. Keating talks about the challenges of burnout in a career where “medicine is your mistress.” He then explains how his faith helps him work with patients with CLL and his sense that he was destined to be a leukemia physician. He compares faith in everyday life in the United States and Australia. He tells a funny story about a patient shouting for Jesus’s help during a procedure.
Next Dr. Keating explains why he and his family returned to Australia in 1977−1978, then returned to MD Anderson in 1978. He describes a conversation with his sister, Maureen, who helped him make the difficult decision to leave Australia. Dr. Keating observes that he has never had a sense of not being loved, an important element of his ability to stay on his evolving career path.
Identifier
KeatingM_01_20140513_C07
Publication Date
5-13-2014
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal Background; Personal Background; Influences from People and Life Experiences; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents; Evolution of Career; Funny Stories; Faith; Offering Care, Compassion, Help
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How has that worked out for you, that balance?
Michael Keating, MD:
It’s been a continuing challenge, because, you know, my wife said, “I don’t have to worry about you having a mistress, because medicine is your mistress,” and it’s true. You know, one of the things that happens is that you spend so much time here, that you spend more time at your job than any other activity in your life. And when you’re looking after patients and things go well, you’ll be given pats on the back and say, “You’re wonderful, Doctor, you saved my life,” etc., etc., and that’s very difficult for your spouses to compete with, because when you’re coming home, you come home late and dinner’s ruined and you forgot to pick up the milk, you know, you can pay attention to all the detail in one place and you don’t have it in other places. So it’s difficult, and I’m very grateful for the fact that our children have been—they’ve all got along very well. There are four kids with four years in between, and they pretty much all like each other and still all live around Houston. We had Mother’s Day with the kids and the grandkids the other day, and everyone was there. There were no long-distance phone calls, etc. And I think that provided the buffer for Bernadette, that she was taking great pride in the fact that she was able to raise these children with a largely absent husband. It’s a terrible balancing act, actually, because it is very intrusive in your life and just tough.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Have you handled it differently over the course of the years?
Michael Keating, MD:
I spend more time since I’ve become old, and in particular in chronic lymphocytic leukemia, it’s predominantly an outpatient disease, so I’ve decided, “Okay, well, I’m not going to do any more inpatient care,” so that there’s a lot less invasion of your weekends. We built a lake house so that we could spend the weekends that I was not off traveling, lecturing, etc., out at the lake house, and that’s been a very good thing. Our kids go up there periodically and take their friends and families, etc. Bernadette looks after the garden, which is a big chore that she loves, and she’s substituted other interests in her life. She left school straight after high school because in those days, Irish Catholic girls were told that you go out and you find a husband, have some kids, and that’s your life. But she thought, “Well, I don’t want to be the only person in the family without a degree,” so she went at the U of H and got a degree in art. So one of the best things that I ever did was to, in the lake house, build a studio above the garage, so that’s her turf, and she owns that whole thing. It’s sort of sacrosanct. She takes her grandkids up there, etc., but it’s her place, and that’s a good thing.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, you mentioned that with Dr. Zubrod, that his faith helped carry him through. Is that something that you identify with?
Michael Keating, MD:
Yes, it is. I think one of the things that I have appreciated, particularly in the acute leukemia, people say, “How can you possibly be looking after these people that frequently die much younger than they should?” The regimens are very toxic, so that it places tremendous demands on the patient and the patient’s family, etc. And they say, “How can you do it?” And I developed the sense, well, they didn’t ask to have leukemia; it happened. They’re searching for someone who will look after them as well as they can with the limited tools that we have. So it was also the sense, well, as long as I do my best to fulfill their expectations, then I’ve done okay. And it was a sense of destiny that, okay, I’m gifted to be a good physician for leukemia, so, in fact, they’re lucky that they got in contact with me and with the MD Anderson, and I’m lucky that they trust me to do these things to them. And it really is this whole sense of mutual trust with the sense of hope that you’ll be able to do something good for people, and also the transfer of faith. America is much more open with displays of religiosity than Australians. The Australians are a lot more conservative. There was a time in the first six months that I was here that the nurses had terrible trouble getting an IV started, and I was out of practice because the nurses would be doing all the IVs. So they said, “We’ve failed on this lady. Five of us have tried different times, and she really needs this treatment.” So I came up and I said, “Okay, well, I’ll give it a try.” And it was this older black lady, and so she had her family around. It was a Sunday morning and they’d been to church and they’d come in to see her. Then I said, “Well, I think I can see a vein in the back of your hand, so I’m going to try to get this in. So perhaps the family could wait outside,” etc. And I’d say, “Well, I’m going to do this and I’m going to do this and this.” And then I said, “Well, okay, now I’m going to put the needle in.” As soon as I said that, she screamed out, “Jesus, help him! Jesus, guide the needle into my—!” And I’m [demonstrates]. (laughter) It was a terrifying thing, that I’m trying to focus on this tiny little thing and she’s screaming out all over the place. But it went in. (laughter) So at some point you have to say, well, religion and prayer may or may not work, but we don’t know that it doesn’t. So there’s never any problem. So it’s a warmth that keeps families going. It’s like there are no atheists in foxholes. Well, there aren’t too many atheists at MD Anderson either. They have to hand over hope to some higher power as they understand him or her. So it’s been a good thing for me to open up a lot.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’m curious about how or why you took your family back to Australia, I mean, because we were talking about your period of you being a professor and fellow.
Michael Keating, MD:
Well, all my family was back there and all Bernadette’s family were back there, and it is really hard to give up a country that you love. And I had a wonderful life in Australia, and I still think that the quality of life in Australia is better than the United States, because there has been less drive to accumulate material assets. I say that the difference between Australia and the U.S. is that Australians spend more time planning their vacation than their career, so that it’s a very good place to live, but it’s not a good place to work in medicine at the highest levels because the structure is very European and people of talent put back into a slot so that you train, you come back, you’re better at this than anyone else, but you’ll still have the professor making the decisions. The thing that was magic about Dr. Freireich is that he gave you tremendous opportunity, and you were responsible for the success or failure of what you did. And he would be a Machiavellian critic. He would sometimes tell you how wonderful your work was, so that you’d go out beaming and say, “Okay, I’ve got to work harder because I’m very important,” or he’d say how terrible the stuff was, and you’d want to prove that he was wrong. So that there was seldom a day you went out of the room that you weren’t more committed to doing something. So he was a master manipulator. So that it was just a question of was the work that I had come to love more important than my country and my family back there. Then when I got back there, I’d found that I had become addicted to the work here, and it was a tremendous sacrifice on Bernadette’s part to agree to come back. That was a very stressful time in our marriage—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I can imagine.
Michael Keating, MD:
—because she had bought a house that she loved and we had had to leave it, etc. But the thing that made me decide to come back was that my sister, my oldest sister, is a nun, and she was over in Adelaide and had been over there at a conference, and I was telling her that I was making this decision to come back or not to come back. And she said in her nun career that the things that she regrets is when she had the chance to do something but she was too frightened to do it. And she said, “What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? You’ll flunk and you’ll come back here and we’ll still love you.” When I told my father I was going back, he was getting on in years at that time, and he said, “Mick, no matter how far away we are, we’ll always be close.” And this was just a way of saying, “You have a destiny, and we’ll support you.” It was a tremendous gift to me.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Permission to go. (laughs)
Michael Keating, MD:
Very impressive.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah.
Michael Keating, MD:
I owe so much to my family, and I still have my three sisters over there, and no matter what happens, they just love me and I love them, but they get more of a chance to show it to me than I get to show it to them, because when I go back, I become the center of attention again, etc., because I’m just there visiting for a while.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. What is the name of your sister who gave you that wonderful advice?
Michael Keating, MD:
Her name is Maureen, and she’s a very impressive lady. She decided not—she wanted to become a nun ever since high school, but my parents were poor and she thought that she needed to be around to support them until, oh, I was pretty much through high school by then and my little sister was four years behind. She thought, “Well, they’re okay now,” and etc., so she went off. And I just appreciate the fact that she made her decisions and her sacrifices along the way. She’s still very active. She’s just finished her assigned task, and her task was to look after the elderly nuns, and she finished that when she was seventy-eight, so she was looking after nuns who were older than her, etc., and organizing their fun activities, etc. So, a lot of good people that I have learned from in my life.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
A family with people who care for other people.
Michael Keating, MD:
Yeah.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Formally and informally.
Michael Keating, MD:
I tell people I never had a sense of not being loved, and we didn’t have much in the way of resources, but all of us came out knowing that our parents thought we were terrific.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It’s really a gift.
Michael Keating, MD:
Mm-hmm, it is. I have many gifts that have been given to me, and in some ways I feel it’s an arrogance, but I believe it really is a sense of destiny, that you go in different paths and other paths open up. And, again, when Yogi Bera says, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and so when the fork in the road comes, you have to decide to do one or the other, and if you go the wrong way, you can always come back, but you have to keep on moving forward rather than being paralyzed with the fear of making a mistake, because we all make them.
Recommended Citation
Keating, Michael MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: Faith and a Loving Family Support a High-Stress Career" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1175.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1175
Conditions Governing Access
Open
