An old newspaperman repays a debt
By Carl Heintze
Everyone carries in his or her mind an ideal of what a doctor should be: kind, attentive, humorous, caring, never tired, always at the ready.
Such doctors don't come often, but when they do, they are precious, filled with that special and indefinable something that sets them apart from the rest of us.
Dr. Phillip Benaron of Saratoga was such a doctor.
Dr. Benaron was a pediatric cardiologist. He was concerned with the heart health of hundreds, maybe even thousands of children.
Because of this I never was a patient of his nor, strictly speaking, were any of my children. And yet, because of the breadth of his concern, he was both a doctor to me and to my family.
Dr. Benaron never looked like a doctor. I'm not really sure what a doctor looks like. Phil was short, round-faced, usually smiling, bespectacled with a soft voice, instantly filled with rapport.
He had that special kind of empathy that is indefinable, but which is a part of the best doctors. You knew when he talked to you that he cared. I can't tell you how he conveyed this feeling. You had to be there to feel the warmth. Then you knew it was there.
I knew it was there because I could contrast it with a colleague who didn't have it. It was the difference between a good doctor and one who was simply capable.
But Phillip Benaron had it.
How doctors manage it, especially in this harried time of HMOs, Medicare, Medi-Cal, the bottom line and the impersonalization of medicine I don't know. It must be increasingly more difficult. But I know it is essential in good medical care, and I know Dr. Benaron managed it.
Somehow after we had only known one another for a short time, I thought of myself as his friend. There was no special reason why I should think this, but I don't think this feeling was unusual. I think many people thought of him as a friend. More than that, he made you feel you were a special friend, even on short acquaintance.
There were lapses of time between our various encounters, but I never felt there was any lapse in our friendship. Meeting him the first time was just like meeting him the last time about nine months ago when he told me he was suffering from lung cancer.
Although neither of us said it aloud, both of us knew that meant it might be a long time, if ever, before we saw one another again. And it was.
I've said that Phil was a doctor and I was his patient. This happened a long time ago when he was a pediatrician, and I was a newspaperman. I was having trouble with one of my children. One of them was suffering from a school phobia, and I was desperate for some solution, some way to get the child back to school.
I told Phil about this. I must have sounded desperate. In any event, he took me aside, got me in his office and, taking time off from his busy day without charge, spent an hour with me discussing, in a calm and rational way, steps necessary to get around the problem.
It worked. Both child and father were, if not cured, at least made well again.
When I reminded Phil of this years later, he had only a vague recollection of it (even though he said he remembered it) because I am sure it was one of literally thousands of such conversations he had with the parents of his patients. And I can guess most of them had outcomes like ours.
That event, as well as other encounters, made Dr. Phillip Benaron a special kind of physician in my life and, I feel fairly sure, in the lives of many others.
Because it did, I felt I owned him an immense debt. He had guided me through what was at the time a major crisis in my life and he had apparently done it effortlessly with (as usual) humor, honesty and a sense of healing.
When I learned he was sick, I was struck not so much by the fact that he, the physician, was ill, but that I could not reciprocate; I could not repay the debt I owed him by making his problem lessen.
Like so many doctors he had taken better care of his patients than of himself. If he knew this, he never complained. He accepted his illness.
It took its inevitable course.
This essay is an attempt to recapture some of him, some of the spirit of the good doctor from a grateful patient.
Phillip Benaron died Jan. 14, 2001.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
