Conversations: Anthony Chin-Quee, MD
SYNOPSIS
Emily speaks with former ENT surgeon and television writer Anthony Chin-Quee about his memoir, I Can't Save You, which explores his relationship to medicine, his father, and himself.
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Guest
Photo credit: Jonathan Bangle
Anthony Chin-Quee, M.D., is a board-certified otolaryngologist with degrees from Harvard University and Emory University School of Medicine. An award-winning storyteller with The Moth, he has been on the writing staff of FOX’s The Resident and a medical adviser for ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy.
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Hosted by Emily Silverman
Produced by Emily Silverman and Jon Oliver
Edited and mixed by Jon Oliver
Assistant Produced by Carly Besser and Rebecca Groves
Original theme music by Yosef Munro with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions
The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page
TRANSCRIPT
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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Anthony Chin-Quee, MD
Episode Transcript
Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.
Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman.
Physician memoirs are a lot of fun to read, but every once in a while a voice comes along that puts a completely different spin on the genre. Anthony Chin-Quee is one of those voices, as I was very happy to discover in reading his 2023 memoir, I Can't Save You. The book, which I would describe as playful, irreverent, and brutally honest, is a coming-of-age story which chronicles the ups and downs of Tony's residency in ENT, as well as his inner journey coming to grips with his family legacy. Tony was educated at Harvard and Emory, but ultimately made the decision to leave clinical medicine and pursue his dreams as an artist. An award-winning storyteller with The Moth, he's been on the writing staff of FOX's The Resident and ABC's Grey's Anatomy, which you'll hear much more about in the interview that follows.
But first, let's hear an excerpt from Tony's book, I Can't Save You. Here's Tony.
Anthony Chin-Quee
At 11:43 a.m., that little black Motorola box of horrors chirped at me for the first time. I might or might not have spontaneously peed a couple of drops before I got it together. No big deal, right? Happens to everybody?
I picked up the phone and dialed the emergency room. The conversation panned out just like a scene from your average nineties-era fish-out-of-water comedy except significantly less funny, as functioning body parts were at stake.
The ER: This is the ER.
Tony: (still damp in the pants): Hi, this is Dr. Chin-Quee from plastic surgery returning a page.
ER: Yeah, um, cool. So listen, we've got a forty-year-old gentleman down here who dislocated his right ring finger when he fell off a bike this morning. We've had a couple of residents and attendings try to pop it back in place but no dice, so we wanted to have the hand specialist come and take a look.
Tony: Yeah, it sounds like you should totally do that.
ER: So... are you going to come down, or?
Tony: (Oh, right, that's me! The hand specialist!) Oh, yeah, absolutely! I'll be down in a few.
I got on the computer and looked up the patient's X-ray, holding my right hand up for reference, as the number of hand X-rays I'd critically evaluated to that point in my life was equal to zero.
Despite my lack of experience, even I could see that his right ring finger looked funny as hell. Suddenly (and thankfully), anatomical vocabulary came flooding back to me from some dusty med school corner of my brain. There was no evidence of fracture in any of the bones of the hand. The fourth metacarpophalangeal joint (the base of the finger) had been dislocated. The finger seemed to be seated dorsal to (behind) the metacarpal bone, which comprised the "palm" portion of the digit.
I had successfully completed step one: determine that the emergency room wasn't lying to me. Awesome. Now for step two: do something.
But, wait, should I do something? I had never, ever fixed a dislocated finger in my life. Maybe it was time to call my senior and ask him to come to the hospital and show me how to do it?
Nah, eff that noise. Was I really going to call my senior for my first consult of all time without even trying to fix the problem? And honestly, what was the worst thing that could happen? I could try and fail and the poor biker's finger would continue to dangle in the breeze. He might be in a little bit more pain, but none the worse for the wear. No, there would be no call to my senior. That day, I would celebrate my Independence Day.
To that end, I exercised one of the great freedoms my forefathers had fought, bled, and died for: the internet search. I logged on to YouTube and typed in "how to fix a dislocated finger." Please hold your applause. Ten minutes later, I walked through the doors of the ER with the tails of my white coat billowing behind me. Emboldened by the treasures of the web, my swagger was fully flexed. The hand specialist was on the loose.
I walked into the patient's room and introduced myself as Dr. Chin-Quee from plastic surgery, the title still ringing false as it escaped my lips. The patient looked up, relieved that "the specialist" had finally arrived. I was immediately struck by how tall he was: easily six foot nine, with enormous hands and long, chubby hot-dog fingers. And of course one of those Ball Park franks was jutting out of his hand at an unnatural angle.
"Aright, Doc," he said, reclining in his oversized spandex riding kit. "Do your worst."
Emily Silverman
I am sitting here with Dr. Anthony Chin-Quee, who today I will be calling "Tony". Tony, thank you so much for being here today.
Anthony Chin-Quee
So thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Emily Silverman
Tell me about your life right now. Where in the world are you? I understand that you're no longer practicing ENT medicine. So, what are you up to these days? And what is life like for you?
Anthony Chin-Quee
I am currently living in northern England, in a city called Durham. I moved out of the States a year ago, almost to the day. And, since I left medicine... Well, I did a soft exit in 2019, and still did a little bit of locums here and there. But, that's when I started my life as a television writer. And so I transitioned into that. There were a lot of really fortuitous things that helped me get there. I was living in Los Angeles, and I met some great people, and I had an opportunity to help out in the Writers' Room at "Grey's Anatomy" for several months. That kind of whet my appetite for the occupation. And, I totally went for it. So now that's what I do full-time.
Emily Silverman
And why England?
Anthony Chin-Quee
England was a family decision, mostly because my wife has always wanted to move to Europe, and specifically England. So, we decided that after I made some inroads with my new career, (which I couldn't have done without her) that we were going to swing the pendulum back, and we'd make her dreams come true by moving out to England. So, she used to be a Nurse Practitioner, and now she is a student. A Master's student in Archaeology, at the University of Durham. So, that's what we're doing out here.
Emily Silverman
I have so many questions about your life as a TV writer for medical dramas. But, we're also here to talk about the book. So let's start there. And hopefully, we'll get to some of the TV stuff at the end. So tell us about the moment you decided to write this book. I've been kind of listening to interviews with you and reading articles about you. And it sounds like there was, for you, like a moment where you made that choice, and I was wondering if you can bring us into that?
Anthony Chin-Quee
Yeah, absolutely. So, there was a specific moment when I made the decision. And that moment, chronologically, is in the book, even though I don't specifically talk about it inside the book. But it's when I was in the middle of residency. I was in a real bad state of mind. I was in the middle of this major depression episode that I was trying to claw my way out of, waiting for the medications to start working and clear my head. And I had been asked to leave my program, because I had failed Step Three. And was dealing with the fallout of that, and was really searching for any reason to keep going, both in my life and in medicine. It felt like my job every day was just trying to murder me. So, I had to figure out, "Why should I go back? And, what can I do with this, ultimately? And, I had this moment of clarity, where I remembered how much I'd always loved telling stories, whether it was through music, whether it was through acting, whether it is just through storytelling, it's something I always loved to do, and I had always been told that I was pretty good at it. And so I started thinking,"What if I use this whole experience to tell my story?" Of how I went through medicine, but tell it in a way that was a little bit more genuine, a little more honest about the difficult times, than other doctor memoirs that I'd grown up reading. We have a tendency to make ourselves look really good, and say that medicine ultimately saved us when times got tough. And that had not been my experience. And I had a feeling that had not been the experience of several other people. So that's when I decided to write it.
Emily Silverman
You use the word honest. And I couldn't agree more. This book, just like, tastes different than a lot of other physician memoirs. There's an irreverence to it, and a fearlessness to it, that I just found to be so intoxicating. In this book, you say things that other doctors might be afraid to say. Whether it has to do with your motivations to go into medicine, the dysfunction of medical culture, racism, in medicine, substance use. You also play a lot with form in this book. So, you're constantly in dialogue with yourself. You use poetry. There's one chapter that's a written letter to another character. There's song lyrics; there's even a screenplay format at one point in this book. So, I'm curious, how did you find your voice as a memoirist? Because it is such a alive voice that just jumps right off the page. And I'm wondering if that came easy to you, or if you had to work at honing that.
Anthony Chin-Quee
A little bit of both. I definitely had to work at honing it. Because when I started writing the book, I didn't realize, and it took an editor to tell me like, "Hey, you got to remember, like, this isn't a stand-up comedy. That's kind of how it jumps off the page in certain ways. This is a written medium, and you have to respect that and kind of write in that way. Not to take away from the dialogue forward way that you write the prose, but just remember that you're not actually speaking to an audience." And so, in early iterations of the book, I was writing it as if I were speaking to an imaginary audience. And, I had that kind of a breakthrough, when he gave me that note, that maybe instead of talking to that imaginary audience, it would be more powerful if I were talking to myself the entire time. And that really opened up a lot of the different chances that I took with messing with the form. And it allowed me to be even more honest, because I was really taking myself to task a lot more, which was difficult. And ultimately, I think what felt really good.
Emily Silverman
From the opening chapter, you're in dialogue with this voice in your head. And this voice argues with you; it chides you; it guides you. Tell us about this voice. Do you have this voice? Or was it more of a creative device? Where did that come from?
Anthony Chin-Quee
I mainly used it as a creative device. But, I think that it's definitely a voice that always lived inside me. It's something that I rarely listen to, and tried to block out, which comes across in how it is written in the book. But I think we all have that voice. We all have that. It's not really a shoulder angel, but it's the voice of who we want to be, and who we could be. But that voice speaks to you from the safety of, like, inside your head. It doesn't have to deal with all of the stuff that you're seeing and touching and smelling and feeling and arguing with and having difficulty with every day. And so, that relationship between who you think you can be and who you actually are in that moment is contentious. And I think a lot of people can relate to that.
Emily Silverman
In some ways, to be in the creative process is to go a little bit crazy, and, like, hear all these different voices. There's also a playfulness there that I really loved. I mean, how did that unlock honesty? Because like I said, you just say stuff where I read it, and I'm like, "Oh my God, it's just so unfiltered." And you do filter yourself sometimes. There's actually parts in the book where you'll write a sentence, and then you'll actually strike it through. But you'll leave the strikethrough there, so we can see you kind of editing yourself as you go. How did you get that honesty on the page? Even the moments where you're talking about why you went into medicine, and you're like, "Honestly, all this stuff about, like, a calling, blah, blah, blah? Like, that's bullshit."
Anthony Chin-Quee
Yeah, so some honesty was easier than other honesty, which is kind of one of the points of the book. It's much easier to be honest about the things in medicine that don't make sense, and that I didn't like, and I thought were ridiculous. But it was much more difficult to be honest with myself about the things I'd been lying to myself about since I was a kid, breaking down those rules I'd been operating under as if they were the truth, but were slowly killing me. And so, the hating on medicine stuff is easy. Because I went into the writing of this book, thinking, "Hey, man, if I don't ever get another job in a hospital, being a doctor, for what I write, then fuck it. This was worth it." But, the harder truths of navigating my own internalized racism and navigating my internalized misogyny, and really understanding the impact that my dad had on me, you know, throughout my life, that I had been running away from... Those were much harder. And I thought, when I began the book, that I had a handle on it. But as I wrote, I realized, "Oh, wow. Still so blocked. I'm so angry about a lot of these things." And, in order to finish this book, I had to go through a lot of therapy, you know, so that I wasn't dealing with it on the page. Because I think a mistake that I was really trying to avoid, was using the book as therapy. Because a reader can tell that, and it's unfair for you to put people in that position. And it's ultimately not written for anybody but you, if you do it that way. But, you have to navigate that stuff; come out the other side, so that you can be intentional about where you put those emotions. If I want to be, as a protagonist, very angry, I can choose to do that, instead of it just happening to me as I'm writing. If that makes sense.
Emily Silverman
It does make sense. And it's hard to explain, because it's so subtle, but the difference between, like, a clean anger on the page versus, like, a dirty anger on the page that feels like it hasn't been worked out.
And I see this sometimes with live storytelling, which is what I've been working on the last seven years. You know, coaching people and really trying to figure out, like, are you at a place where you're ready to tell this story on stage. Because if you're not, like, there is a way in which people can run the risk of going on stage and kind of like spontaneously combusting on stage in front of an audience, and... But it doesn't mean that there can't be anger. I don't know, maybe you can help me think through the difference between like a healed energy or an unhealed energy on the page.
Anthony Chin-Quee
That is the difference. That is the difference. It's the difference between a healed energy and an unhealed energy on the page. And I couldn't see it originally, because I still had healing to do. And once I did, and I've looked back on these early drafts, I could see just how much things were just dripping with all the unfinished business. It wasn't showing the sort of growth that I was hoping to show, because I wasn't there yet. That's why it took seven years to write.
Emily Silverman
Yeah, I was gonna say, there are moments in the book that feel like "Dear Diary" moments where you're like, you know, I haven't written in a few months, or I haven't written in a while, and I'm back. And it just made me wonder. I didn't know it took seven years, but now that you say that, it makes sense. Can you tell me a little bit about those seven years? Like, what was your process? Did you come home from a horrible shift, and, like, burst out a bunch of writing? And then, like, not write for six months? Or was it a little bit every day? Or how did that all come out?
Anthony Chin-Quee
Gosh. I count those seven years starting from when I left residency. That's when I actually started writing the book. So, I guess it's more like nine or ten. But when I first started, and I was still in training, and I decided I was going to do this, I just had the feeling during or after certain interactions, that these were moments that I should remember. And so, I would go home and write them down. I took a lot of photographs during that time to help me remember. Originally, they were going to be in the book, but apparently putting in pictures makes books too expensive. But, there were photographs for every section of the book from that time. And, all the poetry, all the music, the stuff I wrote at the moment that I kept with me. And then, once I got out of training, that's when I started to try to put everything together. And just started at the beginning; started with Chapter One, and was still trying to figure out what the book was going to be. I started with maybe I'm just gonna write about my experience in residency, and how awful it was. And, you know, it took my very first editor to tell me like, "It doesn't seem like you want to write an expose a of medicine here; that's not your angle. But I think you're trying to tell a much more personal story. And I think you're really talking about the story of you and your dad." And, that was the best feedback I could have gotten,and that was in that first year. And then I decided to reframe the entire book as me navigating my relationship with my father and who I wanted to be. And, my experience in medicine just proved to be the best context for me to figure that out.
Emily Silverman
And interestingly, we don't hear the full story of your father until quite a ways in. I think there's a sentence where you say, "I think now it's time for me to properly introduce you to my father."
Anthony Chin-Quee
That's pretty much the midpoint of the book, when I finally decide to talk about what has been lying beneath the entire time. And it was very intentional, very important that I do it in that way. And I only was able to talk about my dad, when I was really at my lowest point, because I wanted to demonstrate all of the ways in which that relationship had been getting its claws into all of my choices. There's a lot, especially in the first half of the book, where I knew, like, I'm making this character, who's not really likable. Because that's who I was. I know I was, even as I tried to convince myself I wasn't. And it was really important for me to show folks, these are the decisions that you make when you're not quite sure. You're not quite ready to dig into yourself. That's why I chose to have the full reveal, and the full honest examination of who my dad was, come in the middle. I wanted folks to see the descent, and really be reaching the point where they're just like, if we're going to stick by this protagonist, we're going to need to know why, like now, because this guy is getting dark and I'm not sure I like him.
Emily Silverman
But going back to that stretch of the book before the reveal, there are a lot of tumultuous scenes. There's a lot of sex, there's a lot of alcohol, there's depression, there's self-harm behaviors, there's cutting. And it's not just you. You bring us into the world of you and your surgical colleagues. And, it almost felt to me like a darker, more real version of "Grey's Anatomy". Like, on "Grey's Anatomy", everybody's kind of fucked up and everybody's, you know, in the call room, or whatever. But, here we have a young woman who is a surgeon, who is trapped in an elevator unconscious from alcohol poisoning, because she's using alcohol to escape. And then, you know, she gets taken to the ER, at the hospital where she works. And then she wakes up, and is like pissed at everybody. And then, still makes it to rounds, fifteen minutes late. So how did you think about writing those parts?
Anthony Chin-Quee
One major thing that I wanted to accomplish with the book was to show we're all having such a hard time. And none of us knows quite how to navigate it. Residency, the one thing it's really good at is stripping away all of your... all the ways in which you avoid dealing with your darkest secrets and your deepest pains. And so, you put a bunch of people together, and they're all desperate in their own way. And that's who your family is: a bunch of desperate kids. And we want to take care of each other, but we just can't do it in a healthy way. When I was writing about people I knew, and writing about friends of mine (even people that I ultimately did not end up staying friends with, and I'm not friendly with to this day), my goal in doing that was never to write these stories just to tell a sensational story about someone who was all fucked up or shamed them for their decisions. My goal was to write about these folks from a place of love. And a place of caring. And also, to make sure that I was never above that behavior either. Like, to scrutinize myself just as hard as I'd scrutinize everyone else around me. We're going to make mistakes; we're going to try to cope in dangerous ways. And we're not going to take care of each other in the way we wish we could.
Emily Silverman
Yeah, it reminded me of the audio series that The Nocturnists did several months ago on the emotion of shame, "Shame in Medicine". And one thing I discovered just listening to shame story after shame story after shame story coming from, mostly doctors, across the United States, was how a career in medicine is such a great place to hide one's trauma. And there's so much that the profession does for us. Like, it gives us status, it gives us a sense of worth, it gives us a sense of value. You even say in the book... Why did you choose ENT? And you say, "This may be sort of a dickish rationale, but after spending so many years in school and putting myself in hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, I felt like being a badass surgeon was the only way I'd make the journey worthwhile." And like, mic drop, you know, like just that sheer honesty. And so, yeah, I'm just curious about that. If you look at doctors, or maybe even more granularly, if you look at surgeons, because that's like a very specific phenotype. Now that you've been out of it for... It sounds like it's been years you've been out of it. What do you feel when you think about surgeons?
Anthony Chin-Quee
When I think about surgeons, all I can think about when I talk to my friends and former colleagues and and think about my old bosses, is that nobody's really hiding. We're actually very bad at hiding. And if you think you're hiding your insecurities, your shame, your pain, it's coming out in all sorts of different ways. It's coming out in your interactions with your patients, in your interactions with your colleagues, in your interactions with your friends and family. You know, in your interactions with yourself. It's all coming out somewhere. Nobody can keep that stuff bottled up. But we just believe we can. Because we believe that we're so smart, and we have the skills that are so hard to master. And if we can do that, then we can do anything. And we really can't. And I've seen that fragility on display, especially when old bosses of mine are confronted with how they've acted in the past, and when they hear stories of how I've felt about training, or they read stuff from the book. Some folks react with introspection; some folks react violently. Some folks react with anger. And it's usually the latter, because they've worked so hard to build up this impervious shell of a persona, that when their shame is put right in their faces, they can't handle it. There's nothing they can do.
Emily Silverman
We had a surgeon come on The Nocturnists stage and podcast. Her name's Alessa Colaianni, and she's actually a head and neck surgeon out in Portland. And her story was about going through surgical residency and feeling like she lost access to, like, the color palette of her emotions. So like the red, blue, yellow, green. And it was like happy, sad, angry, you know, whatever. And she used to be so in touch with these emotions. She used to actually be an actress. Her job on stage was to, like, channel these emotions, and then she found herself after residency, just lost. And I was thinking of her as I read this passage in your book. You wrote, "I used to feel things. The big broad emotions – happiness, anger, fear, pain. I took them all for granted. I never interrogated them, because they were baked into me at birth. Like the five senses, our basic emotions are part of what it means to be human. I never had to question how to feel them. They just happened naturally, and I’d lost them. I'd slowly and steadily been betrayed by this profession, my survival instincts, my increasing inability to control my own thoughts, and left with nothing but ash, where those pieces of my humanity used to be, and I barely noticed." And that was the thing that her story said too, is she actually didn't realize that this was the case until it was too late. I mean, that sounds really ominous. Like, she's fine. If you could imagine an alternate reality where surgical residents are happy and thriving and well-rested, what would that reality look like? And, would you want to be a surgeon in that reality? Or do you feel like, even if the culture shaped up and it became super doable, that still, surgery wasn't for you?
Anthony Chin-Quee
What do I think the surgical utopia looks like? I mean, I can't even see it. But, I think... Lots of people smarter than me have talked about the pieces that don't work, and it really starts with the culture that surgeons have built. They want the hierarchy to remain what it is, even if you work every day for the five years (or however many years that you're in training), it's still not enough for you to learn what you need to learn. They teach you to not feel your emotions. If you're too emotive, then that ends up on your evaluations. That happened to me; that happened to a lot of other residents, usually residents of color, usually female residents. There's an ideal personality type that I had to learn about, by failing numerous times. You had to kind of check your emotions at the door. You can't laugh too much; you can't cry at work. You can't tell jokes. You can't make allusions to a life outside of work. I got written up for talking about how I just finished reading... What was that book that came out?... I had just read the Hunger Games or something. And I was in clinic, and I had just finished reading that book, and I mentioned it to my attending. And then that appeared in my evaluation. Because that same day, there were a couple of questions that I got wrong. And, if I had time to read fiction, I should have time to read these textbooks. There's so much baked into the culture that we're told is the ideal. And we gotta let go of all that. Do I think it's something that's gonna happen organically over time? I don't know. Maybe? If the world is good, but maybe I'm pessimistic, and it's gonna take burning it all down. Like, I don't know. But I'd love to see that world. That sounds great. And would I have stayed? I might have. I might have stayed longer. Or might have, you know, continued to do medicine, while I pursued other creative outlets. Who knows?
Emily Silverman
You mentioned how this book is really the story of you and your relationship to your father. For our audience, maybe who haven't read the book yet, can you say a few words about your father?
Anthony Chin-Quee
Yeah. I think I actually misspoke earlier; I think book is really about my relationship with me.
Emily Silverman
Yeah.
Anthony Chin-Quee
And a lot of my identity was wrapped up in who my father was (or is), and what our relationship was. And, my dad is alive. My dad was around as I grew up. My parents didn't get divorced until I was a teenager. But, my dad was also an addict. He had a gambling addiction, or he has a gambling addiction. And the presence of that addiction, (just like family members of any addict, I'm sure can tell you) just makes your home hostile in a way that you can't quite understand. It's not always outwardly hostile, and outwardly loud and mean, and... and that sort of thing. A lot of navigating a family member with addiction is silent. And it's confusing. And you second guess yourself. Like, there's a lot of gaslighting. I didn't know that term growing up, but a lot of making you feel like you're the crazy one. That happens in a household like that. And my dad was in denial that he had this addiction for a very long time, and for most of my childhood. And, his addiction and his personality and his mental illness... I'm sure some of it was genetic, but a lot of it was born of how he grew up, and his circumstances. And I struggled so much, over the course of my life, with wondering if it was the circumstances, because then maybe I could avoid those circumstances, or if it was genetic, and it was just in my blood to become just like him. And, it may sound like a childish notion to have as an adult, but I think a lot of people (if they're honest with themselves), they know the feeling. And, the funny thing was like, I spent so much time worrying that I would become him, regardless of whatever I did, that I created circumstances around me to make similar decisions to what he did as well. And so those times were really frustrating for me; they were really scary for me. It left me to wonder what hope I had. And getting to that point where I could find hope that I could be my own person that I wasn't all of his mistakes embodied took so much time. But I'm so glad that I got to the place I did, but I know that so many others don't get to that place. And it was really an intention of mine with this book, to hopefully show folks what one example of that journey looks like.
Emily Silverman
This theme of destiny versus agency, and this idea of breaking the cycle, will probably be relatable to a lot of readers who are dealing with whatever they're dealing with, and their own family line, and their own personal narrative. I was really struck by this one passage where you're talking about lacking male role models for things like what it is to be a man (masculinity), what it means to be a father... And you write, "How can I strive to be the things I've never seen? I don't know what healthy looks like; I don't know what manhood is. I don't know what fatherhood is supposed to be. All I know is what everything isn't. I'm scared that I don't know how to be who I want to be." And I just lingered there, just thinking about my own story. I was adopted. And so when I got pregnant, it was really confusing because my mother was never pregnant. My mother never breastfed; I didn't have a genetic link to my mother. And this baby I was about to have was going to be the first biological relative I had ever met. So I was kind of like, "I don't know what motherhood is..." Or at least that kind of part of motherhood? And so I'm wondering, especially for people in the audience who may be having a similar struggle, what are your thoughts on how to forge ahead in life when you don't have a template?
Anthony Chin-Quee
It's taken me back right now, because I spent so many years of my adult life and my teenage life, thinking those thoughts, striving to just be the opposite of what I had grown up with. And it took me a really long time to realize that just wasn't enough. It's so hard to let go of that feeling of destiny, that feeling that "Holy cow, I've never seen this. How can I be this?" But I think, for me, and it took a really long time to accept, but I think the starting point was recognizing how I had already started to embody the traits that I wanted to see and wanted to be. But it was always in an arena that I didn't realize I needed to look at. Was I learning fatherhood elsewhere? Was I learning it in how I tried to take care of my junior residents?
Emily Silverman
Yeah.
Anthony Chin-Quee
Was I learning how to stand up for myself, and learning what it meant for me to be a Black man in a hostile environment and world? Was I already doing that in the ways in which I decided to fight? And, could I stop calling earlier frames of mind missteps, and just recognize them for what they were? They were just evolutionary steps on the... You know what I mean?
Emily Silverman
It's a learning curve.
Anthony Chin-Quee
It's a learning curve. And like, can you just give yourself some grace, and recognize all the amazing things you've done to prove to yourself (if you just care to look) how ready you are for this next step? How... How much you've embodied all of these things. You've just been looking back instead of looking around you. And I think... You know, of course, those are lofty words to just say, but... Because I know all these problems, all these questions are huge, and they're life-defining. But I think it boils down to that. It boils down to looking in the places, in the nooks and crannies of your life, where you've been demonstrating that you are who you want to be, and holding on to them. And recognize them, and then taking things from there.
Emily Silverman
Oh, that was good! At one point, you describe yourself in the book as an artist masquerading as a surgeon. You talk about as a child loving storytelling and the arts. And, you talk about the heightened reality of storytelling. I really connected to that. I feel that too. Sometimes to me, that heightened reality feels more real than everyday life. I wonder if you could say a few words about storytelling, and just that juice of excitement that you get around storytelling, and bringing us into that. Because that really shines through in this book.
Anthony Chin-Quee
Yeah. There's this feeling that I tried to explain early on in the book that I would get when I was younger. When I'd hear certain chords in songs, when I'd see certain scenes played out in movies, when I'd read certain passages... That I almost get this really soothing shiver undulating through my body, and it's almost like this (sigh). Like, there's something so pure about art, when it hits you in the ways that words can't find, when it's like that space between words. And I would feel that physically, and it was always my favorite feeling. It was so wonderful. And, I strove to find that in my life and create that in my life. I took some of the wrong lessons from this and started trying to manipulate my life to be like these art pieces, to be like these movies that I love. Like, can I control how this interaction goes? Can I control who says what? Can I...? You know, like all that stuff to bring that emotional perfection into reality. And that's something I struggled with as my life went on, and I tried to bring to the forefront in the book. But storytelling to me, it just gives me so much happiness; it gives me so much energy. And I'm so grateful that after I thought I lost it, during my journey through medicine, that I found it again.
Emily Silverman
Well, this might be a nice moment to hear about your life as a TV writer.
Anthony Chin-Quee
Yeah,
Emily Silverman
The kind of professionalization of that feeling in a way. What does that look like?
Anthony Chin-Quee
Oh, man. It's awesome. The coolest thing that I found about how TV is usually written, and... This is how it was on "Grey's", and also on "The Resident", which I wrote on for a couple of years... is that these episodes of TV are not written by one person. They're written by a big group of people who are all artists, who all have different artistic strengths and writing strengths and storytelling strengths. And we utilize everyone to put together the best possible story. And, at the end of the day, you know, someone does the lion's share of the work on that particular episode, and that's whose name is on it. But every single one is such a group effort. And making art as a group is so energizing to me. It's so different than writing a book, which is this largely solitary pursuit. You're getting feedback; you're learning from other people. You're getting better at this pace that's so much faster than you could on your own. And that's my favorite part of writing for TV. It's allowed me to learn the craft super quickly, and I'm continuing to learn every single day. There's constant challenges of: How do we tell the story best? How do we tell it most effectively? How do we tell it with this sort of budget? How do we tell it knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the actors, and the directors? And everybody, and our own strengths and weaknesses? How do we bring out the best in everybody who's working on this production? And it's hundreds of people who are bringing these stories to life. And I think it's a wonderful medium. And I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to play in it.
Emily Silverman
When I imagine a writers' room, I'm actually not sure what to imagine. I think I see like, a room with bagels and snacks, and like a table with ten people around it. Maybe there's a whiteboard, and there's some storyboarding happening. And I'm imagining arguments, and then there's the doctor in the room. And that's you. And you're like, "No, no, no, that's not actually how we shock people out of VFib". Or, you know, whatever it is. Do you wake up at 9am and go to a place? Or, like, what... What is it to be a TV writer?
Anthony Chin-Quee
It's changed a lot over the last couple of years with COVID. I was physically in the room with the "Grey's Anatomy" writers. And I spent most of my time in "The Resident" on Zoom. So it was very different experiences. But the physical writers room that I remember from "Grey's Anatomy", was very comfortable. Lots of couches, lots of big, comfy chairs. We definitely have a big whiteboard, and that's how we organize our stories, and structure them so everyone can see and everyone can remember. But a lot of it is just sitting around. Someone comes up with an idea, either a medical idea or a character emotional idea, and you have a roomful of 10-12 people who sit and think about it, and throw out ideas on how to make that happen. What I learned, that I think being a doctor in the room... The one thing I learned very quickly... and I think the pitfall that experts have in rooms like this, is that they can stop the creative flow by telling people what they cannot do, by just shutting ideas down by saying "No", instead of saying, "Well, like, yeah, we want to have an episode where this person's heart just explodes. And it just goes everywhere. It goes on people's faces, and they're wiping it out of their eyes. Like, is that a thing?" And then...
Emily Silverman
I'm glad they have you there.
Anthony Chin-Quee
And I'm just like, "Well, let's talk about that. What do you want these characters to get out of this experience? What do you want them to feel?" Because I can then find a scenario, that's within the realm of possibility, that can give you that. Like, you want blood on their faces, and body parts out of the body, we can do that. We can't necessarily make a heart explode. But emotionally, we can make it explode. So let's work in that sandbox. So it's just finding ways creatively to help everybody get down the road of their idea. And if it turns out to be an idea that's not going to work, once you knock it around and poke the holes in it for like, a day or two. And that's okay, you let it go. But if it is, it goes through the same sort of rigorous process, with just a bunch of people just trying to make it better. And there's a lot of snacks. Like a lot. A lot of snacks, a lot of lunch. A lot of breaks; writers love to take breaks.
Emily Silverman
Like the opposite of surgery.
Anthony Chin-Quee
The opposite of surgery. Like here... I was, when I first started, I was like, "Man, they take a lot of breaks." Incredible! They're going for walks. They gotta get some sun, you know, all that stuff. They never work through their lunchtime. I was like, "God, this is the best!" So, that was a big selling point.
Emily Silverman
So, in the book, you say that you went through a letting go process of medicine. You know, letting go of this lifestyle where you're standing in an Operating Room for 12 hours, to now this new occupation where you're dreaming up story ideas and eating snacks and going for walks. To me, that sounds like a nice trade. So, do you feel like you've completed the letting go process? And, for people listening who want to leave medicine or maybe they don't want to leave medicine, but they want to make a change... Like they want to let go of their current job and pivot into another job or change their orientation within the profession of medicine. Being on the other side of it, do you have any tips or thoughts about that metamorphosis of letting go of one just completely different identity, lifestyle, existence, consciousness, and like finding yourself in this just totally different place years later? The distance traveled is so much; that's such a journey. So, any suggestions for people who might be on a similar journey, whether it's like, you know, bigger or smaller?
Anthony Chin-Quee
It's so funny that you say that, because I've become the patron saint of quitting medicine to a lot of my friends who've gone through it, who are thinking about it, or just need something different. And what I always tell them, because there's a lot of barriers that people put up for themselves against change, especially in medicine. The first thing anyone tells me is, "Oh, it's the finances, I gotta pay off my loans. I can't make any moves until I do that." And, I'm still paying off my loans. They'll get paid. Money will come. If you have to pay them off for you to have peace of mind, do that. But don't let go of starting the process of looking into other ways in which you can use your knowledge and your degree, your expertise, because they're out there. And academic medicine, which we all come up through, is very good at telling you that there's only a couple of ways to be a doctor. They're very good at telling you like, "Hey, you can be in academic medicine," because those are all the bosses, you see. You either do this or you go to private practice. That's it. But there's so many other ways in which you can do it. If you're a writer, there's loads of medical writing, consulting, people who are looking for that skill set. If you want to get involved in politics, there's so many ways in which you can do that. Still do your day job, but just get involved in the local or national level in political movements that are really important to you, where your expertise is needed. If you want to get involved in technology, God... Tech loves medical brains, and they're looking for it. There are so many ways to live this life, and change the world in a way that makes you feel more like you. We're all unique. We all have specific gifts and loves and passions. And you should not have to forego your passions for your entire life for this job that you signed up for when you were 21. Like a lot's changed. Respect that change; listen to it. So that's what I tell folks when they're starting to get the itch and they're starting to actually vocalize the need for a change.
Emily Silverman
So, what's next for you, Tony, as a writer? To the extent that you can share, another book? A TV show? A film? A play? Like, where is your heart leading you these days?
Anthony Chin-Quee
My heart is leading me deeper into the TV and film world. Just like any writer, television writer, will tell you, one of my goals is to create my own television show. I'm working on that. And I think that... Not only is it that I want to tell stories in a way that I haven't seen on TV, but I really want to create a work culture that embodies all the things that I value. So, that's something that I'm really excited about and want to be a part of, and want to have part in creating. I don't have plans for another book at the moment, much to my agent's chagrin. But I can't rule that out. I really just love writing in that arena. Really, I love writing in lots of different ways. So, just keeping myself open.
Emily Silverman
Do you feel like you're boxed in to medical healthcare stories? Or do you feel like now that you're in this Hollywood world that you might branch out to non-medical stories? Or, where are you landing with that? Because, that's something I struggle with sometimes, as an aspiring artist myself, is like, does it always have to be medical?
Anthony Chin-Quee
That's up to you. I got into the industry, using medical stories and telling medical stories. But then it's on you if you want to tell different types of stories, to go ahead and create them to show people that you have a lot more stories to tell. And that's what I've been focusing on the last year, is coming up with brand-new stories having nothing to do with medicine, but digging more into the things that I care about, that I think are interesting and provocative, so that I can show people like, "Hey, I don't just have to be the doctor writer in your room. I have a lot more to say."
Emily Silverman
I have been speaking with Dr. Anthony Chin-Quee about I Can't Save You (his memoir), and about his amazing career in television writing. Tony, thank you so much for being here to chat with me today. I loved your book, and I loved this conversation.
Anthony Chin-Quee
Thanks so much, Emily. It's been such a pleasure.
Emily Silverman
Thanks for listening. This episode of The Nocturnists was produced by me, Emily Silverman, and John Oliver. John also edited and mixed. Carly Besser and Rebecca Groves assistant produced. The Nocturnists Executive Producer is Ali Block. Our Chief Operating Officer is Rebecca Groves. Our original theme music was composed by Yosef Munro, and additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions.
The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, a physician-led organization that works tirelessly to make sure that the doctor-patient relationship remains at the center of medicine. To learn more about the CMA, visit cmadocs.org. The Nocturnists is also supported with donations from listeners like you. Thank you so much for supporting our work. If you enjoy the show, please help others find us by telling your friends about us, posting your favorite episode on social media, or leaving us a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. To contribute your voice to an upcoming project or to make a donation, visit our website at thenocturnists.com. I'm your host, Emily Silverman. We'll be back after Thanksgiving with some more episodes of Conversations. See you then.