Dan Ariely - Honesty and Hope

 

It was summer. A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with some friends. And all of a sudden, I got a call from somebody I didn't know. And they asked me to go to a hospital to meet a family I didn't know. I got to the hospital, and there was this terrible tragedy. There was a family that was involved in a terrible accident, and the two kids were very badly injured. The mother asked me what do I think that her kids would want to know and what would they not want to know. She asked me, because I was badly injured. Many years earlier, I was badly burned in about 70 percent of my body and I was in hospital for about three years, and not in a very dissimilar situation to her kids.

 

When she asked me this question, I went back to the early days in the burn department. I was thinking to myself like, what was my state? I remember the fear and I remember the machines and the sounds. The expression that kept on coming to me in the early days in the burn department was this idea of a pain person. I felt that there were moments that there was nothing else going on. There was just pain, that the pain was just engulfing every aspect of me. It was capturing me. There was nothing else. There was no history. There was no future. There was just a moment of that pain. 

 

I also remember the early days in the bath treatment. Most of my body was burned. Every day, the nurses had to take the bandages off. They would tear it off. When they finished, they would have to rub the flesh to get some blood going on, and then they would cover me with bandages again, just to repeat the same process again. When she asked me what to tell her kids, I was trying to remember those days, and the fear, and the noises, and the pain. I told her that what I wanted to know was what beeps meant that everything was okay and what beeps meant that something was not okay. When was more pain coming and when was some relief going to come. I tried to describe all of those to her as best I could and then I left. 

 

A few days later, I got another call, this time from the mother herself. She didn't say much. She just asked me to come back to the hospital. So, I went back to the hospital, and she told me that one of the kids died. She asked me what to tell the other kid. [sobs] I was trying to figure out, [sobs] how do you deal with something like this? How do you grieve? [sobs] How do you deal with going in and out of consciousness with the pain, and at the same time trying to digest something like this? [sobs] I told her to try and hide it for as long as possible, and not to share it with the kid. 

 

And then a few months later, I got an email from her. She said the kid was doing better, on the path for recovery. She asked me to record or send the kid a message, some optimistic note of hope about his future. And this question brought me again back to my days in hospital. 

 

I remember that about that time, for the first time, I was starting to walk a little bit. I felt a little bit stronger, and I opened the door and I walked to the room next door, which was the nurse's station. I walked into that room and there was this big, full-size mirror. I had seen parts of myself before. I was laying in bed or in the treatment room, and I could see parts of myself. But this was the first time I saw my full self. It was a shocking sight. It was not something that looked real to me. It was hard for me to imagine that this was me. My legs were very bent. The whole body was in a different shape. 

 

My arms, I couldn't really hold them. They were disformed and there was skin coming out of different places. My face was all kinds of colors. There was red and blue, there was yellow. There were pieces of skin hanging. The right side of my face looked very strange, and my eyes were closed. The only thing that looked real was my left eye. But even that it didn't look that real, because I could recognize my left eye, but it looked from a mask that didn't look anything like me. I was standing there looking in some disbelief that this could actually be me. But very quickly, the pain came over me. Standing was very hard for me and I had to walk as fast as I could back to bed. The pain was so intense that I couldn't even keep on thinking about myself in the mirror. 

 

I remembered all of those things and I was thinking, what do I write this kid? He was just starting his path, and this was going to be a long, long path. I was almost 30 years after my injury, and my next treatment was still scheduled. This was not something that you get over very quickly. I had no idea then. I was wondering, what do I tell him? How do I give him a hopeful message? What do I do, between the brutal honesty of the challenges and the difficulties that he's about to face, and some hope? The truth is that I thought he would have been better off dead. I thought that his family would have been better off this way. But I couldn't tell him that. 

 

I cried a lot in the next 48 hours. I cried a lot, trying to figure out what is the right thing to say. And eventually, my hands are not that good, so I recorded the voice message for him. I was trying to find a balance between hope and realism. I recorded something and I sent it to his mother. And two days later, I get another note from her, telling me how much he appreciated it, how much her son appreciated it and asking me to write him another one. 

 

And then, a few months later, I went to visit him in hospital. Before I went to see him in hospital, I was very worried. I've been to hospitals before, I went to see my nurses, my doctors. But this was the first time I was going to see a patient, and a patient who was a teenager, much like me when I was injured and somebody that I felt close to by that time. I didn't know how things would turn out, how would I feel. And to my surprise, things went quite well. 

 

We spoke about all kinds of things, in hospital, out of hospital. I shared some things about my own life. He told me a little bit about what was going on with him. And things were really going on quite well for the first maybe two and a half hours. And then, the nurse came in and she informed him that he was going to have a new treatment. He asked her if they could wait until tomorrow, and the nurse said no. And he asked if they could wait a few hours, and she said no. And he asked if they could wait an hour, and she said no. He asked if they could do it for just one part of his body today, and she said no again. 

 

At that point, I couldn't stand anymore. I had to sit down, and I put my head down and I was trying to breathe very heavily. Almost an anxiety attack came over me, because I remembered all the times when I was trying to negotiate something that would delay the treatment a little bit, give me some control. But then, the treatment came, and I had to part way and live, and get out of the hospital and go on my way. But it made me realize that until that moment, I really thought about my injuries as being mostly physical.It's easy to think about the pain. It's easy to think about the scars, looking different to other people, having difficulty regulating temperature, physical limitations, disability. All of those things are easy. But the reality is that helplessness was a huge part of that. I think it's actually the part that made me hate hospitals the most. 

 

The sad thing about it is that it's the part that we create for ourselves. This is not part of the injury. It's just the way we treat people, in all kinds of ways. Not just in hospitals, but more generally. I still get lots of emails and letters and phone calls from people with all kinds of injuries. About once a week, I get a letter from somebody. I still don't know what exactly to tell people. People need to figure out how to reconfigure their lives, how to deal with the things that disability eliminates, and how to deal with the new opportunities, how to deal with pain. I try to give people the best advice about how to reconfigure their lives. 

 

But the one thing I have learned is to try and give people advice to try and gain some control. Just imagine what would have happened if the nurse had allowed this kid to delay the treatment a little bit, to have it on part of his body first. Maybe they would have allowed me to remove some of my bandages by myself. All of those things would have made a big difference. As for the other big question, the question is how to manage the conflict between brutal honesty and hope, that one, I'm still struggling with.