Choosing the Best Way to Deal with an Ill-Mannered Boor

Francine wrote the outsider rage article in 2009 after an incident where she behaved unprofessionally­—­unprofessionally according to her but certainly not in my book. A colleague working at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital called her in to consult on the case of a twenty-two-year-old Guate­malan woman diagnosed with mutism. The patient had not spoken for nine months and exhibited symptoms of depression and anxiety. She had episodes of hiccups that lasted for hours. Francine read the patient file and noted that the young woman had been brought to the hospital by her sister and not by her husband, an older white male. The patient, though remaining mute, was responsive with Francine, going so far as to smile once.

Her colleague asked Francine to join him in explaining the situation to the husband. She did not like the man, was predisposed not to from looking at the file, but then he exacerbated matters by ignoring her and speaking only to her colleague, who also happened to be a white male. She would speak, and the husband wouldn’t even look her way. He interrupted her a number of times, until she’d had enough.

She told me she wanted nothing more than to slap him and she almost did. It wasn’t just that she’d been wondering whether he was abusive to his wife. It wasn’t just that she’d deduced that the marriage was unequal, a colonialist betrothal. He had married his wife while on “vacation” in Guatemala. It was the fact that this man dared to treat Francine as unworthy of his attention, to treat her as a subaltern, an outsider. She seethed, something almost as rare as a unicorn sighting, as you know. If the man only looked at her, she was sure she would knock him over with her venomous eyes. She was about to slap him, truly, wound up her arm to do it, but her hand stopped at his cheek. She held his face between thumb and palm, sternly telling him he was an ill-mannered boor.

Now, that would have been a fireable offense had she been working for Lakeshore. Under normal circumstances she might have lost her medical license. But the man was terrified. He didn’t file a complaint. One of the nurses joked that he turned mute—mute with stupefaction. Her colleague was stumped, unable to fathom why she’d lost her temper. He told her that of course the man was offensive, but he’d seen her brave much worse without batting an eyelash. Her impassivity was legendary.

The three nurses who witnessed the exchange, two black women and a Puerto Rican gay man, were not flummoxed by her behavior. They were standing behind the boor, and all three gave Francine the thumbs-up.

She was furious with herself for reacting. She began to write the article as soon as she got home.

I told her one of my favorite bad surgeon jokes: no one would dare insult me because they knew I’d cut them up.