SEASON 1: EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT

The Hope that Perseveres

Dr. Anderson Spickard: We've been learning to live with this hole in our heart, as if it was off to the side, and you put it in a category and you deal with it on weekends. And I'm now able to say, I'm learning to live with this hole in my heart that is shaping me, because we know it will never go away, it just becomes a part of our story.


Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is facing significant challenges and at every turn, another conflict seems to await. Yet we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible and undeniable gift; hope. It fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose, and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community.

My name is Greg Jones, President of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with people who demonstrate what it really means to live with hope and lean into the lessons they've picked up along their journey. They are The Hope People.

Today's guest is Dr. Anderson Spickard, a dear friend and the newly named Dean of the Thomas Frist, Jr. College of Medicine here at Belmont. As you'll hear, Anderson has faced personal loss head on, diagnosing and then losing one of his sons, Lucas, to cancer. And through it, he and his wife, Margaret, found a reason to persevere. He shares his journey with us in the hope that it inspires you and your loved ones to do the same.

Anderson, it's great to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: I am honored to be here with you.


Dr. Greg Jones: You're one of those paradigmatic hope people that when I'm around you, I just feel a better sense of hope and centeredness. Where do you see signs of hope and what's giving you hope these days?


Dr. Anderson Spickard: I love that word, and you and Susan have brought this to this community and to this campus so explicitly. So this week, we got notification that our son, William, who has special needs, was featured in Abe's Garden Community Newsletter. Just disruptively gave us a ping of joy and hope. It gave me and my wife, Margaret, that ping of joy. The title of the article was Purposeful Volunteering. And it's exactly what we want to be about and we want our son to be about. We have this hope that he would do more and integrate even further, but we had an experience just this week, two days ago of a little nugget of that right now, which kind of keeps you going and keeps you centered that you may not be so off target or your ideas or your work is not leading to anything.


Dr. Greg Jones: Oh, that's beautiful. That's a great story. And what I love about both you and Margaret and the way you interact is that you're an agent of hope. You're not only somebody who looks for signs of it, but you carry it with you. And how did you learn to develop that? Who are some people that you learned it from who were exemplars to you that helped sustain you in that?


Dr. Anderson Spickard: It's easy to go back to Margaret. I mean she is an agent of hope for me. I know you and I both have had mentors and great influences in our families. She saw, we'll go back to William, that he could possibly read one day and she had hope for him for that when not many people did and he faced a lot of challenges in that space and she partnered with a grad student and figured out how we are at our present state where that boy can read and it can help him integrate. And she also was able to garner other people around this topic to create opportunities for other families to bring their children to learn how to read. So this relentless person who saw something and got busy focused on the future but relentless in the present.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. It's a gift to have a life partner who is inspiring and encouraging in that way and that sort of mutuality. I also think a little bit about, you've been blessed with wonderful parents and I got to know your dad toward the end of his life as it turns out and was struck the first time I met him. He was almost 90 just a little bit after I first met him, but there was a sense of joy and hope in him and he was a doctor, so I'm sure that had to be part of your motivation to go into medicine.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Oh, gosh. I'll tell you how it got started early. He would take me on house calls when I was a kid and I would enter in these situations quiet, looking around the room, trying to observe all that I could. And that influence stuck with me such that I have done house calls my whole career.

In my first house call, I was a third-year medical student and mind you, you're not a physician. We get a call from our next door neighbors that they want to bring their granddaughter, who's in town, over for me to evaluate her for a rash and I quickly tell them, "I am not a physician. You've got a third-year medical student." They brought her over after I quickly got my shoes together, Margaret was there, and as a dutiful third-year student, I knew exactly what to do; you ask questions. When did this start? Have you ever had this before? What are some related symptoms like itching or pain? What makes it better? What makes it worse?

The whole time, Margaret is standing behind this 12-year-old and the parents didn't see Margaret who was mouthing the words to me, "Chicken pox, chicken pox." The point being I knew the technical pieces, the building blocks of science, but not the reasoning and the big picture and needed a little help. Of course I was studied enough to tell them what the rash was with some sort of cadence of confidence and that was my first house call.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's amazing.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Chalked it up to my dad.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's a great story. I love that mentoring role of just sometimes we underestimate the influence we can have on a child just by including them and enabling them to see and experience things in a fresh way.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Absolutely. And that's the beginning of it, being in the room, whatever context that is, understanding the patient's belief systems, challenges, cultural influences, all of the things that we want to talk about and train towards. And then of course, when we leave there, the system that contextualized the throughput of what's the best plan for that patient, that's a vocation.


Dr. Greg Jones: It is indeed. You've made a shift now to become more of an educator and now an administrator and a leader of a college that's beginning to develop its curriculum and focus about how to develop others in that vocation. Talk about how that sense of being an agent of hope is influencing you now as an educator and as a leader of a college of medicine.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Yeah, it's as if I have a new patient, it's just a little bit bigger.


Dr. Greg Jones: And more complicated.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: It is that. We may get to talking about some other stuff, we've been through some things that are not small, and I would summarize by saying, my story is I'm just doing the next thing that's in front of me. And an encouragement to myself and to you and to anyone listening, it just seems like a regular day, but there have been building blocks and commitments and decisions that have accumulated off to converge to this moment. So that agency of being a doc in the room or in the patient's home is very similar to coming here knowing that you're part of something bigger than yourself, that you are loved deeply by a Lord who made you, that, yes, I'm going to disappoint you in a heartbeat and I have the freedom not to be perfect at all times and somehow that engages me to enter in and try to make a difference. So, we're excited about integrating health and wellness and some of the things that are starting to characterize our vision for this college of medicine.


Dr. Greg Jones: You've gone through things over the last three to four years that could cause somebody to just shut down or become bitter or anesthetize yourself and push everything away, and you and Margaret have, in a really beautiful and powerful way, leaned in and been willing to talk about it. Take us through that journey a bit.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: It's hard to believe that these things have transpired in our lives. I actually diagnosed my son, Lucas, when he was in town, married, from Atlanta here in Nashville, right when COVID broke out. We were six, five weeks in to all of the acute adjustments as a healthcare team and as a med school that I was involved with at Vanderbilt when he came and unfortunately gave him the news that you never want to give your son.

Lucas and his amazing wife, whose name is Hope, lived in a belonging way to the Lord and a deferent way to the excellence of all the amazing care that they've got inside and outside of the Vanderbilt system here. And our dear daughter, oldest child, Ana, she's married to Jake and granddaughter Margot, she provided him her bone marrow to give him a chance and he was ahead of the game right when I started my positions here at Belmont. And then unfortunately, he did succumb to his cancer November 11th, 2021.

So soon thereafter, my dad had a stroke and passed away after brief illness, and I would even add that I was diagnosed with cancer as well. My cancer was prostate cancer and went through a definitive therapy in a great spot and back to full health. So you lose your son and you lose your dad and you lose your health in a way and you find yourself upright and putting days together and moving forward and all of a sudden, the realities of what's really important and what you're looking and longing and hoping for and the surety of it becomes a very foundational, experiential influence.

And I would not want this for anybody, but there is hope. There is. And I would say to you, my friend, what I believed and hoped for, I am experiencing in the present. And instead of saying like Job, "Why was I born?" Or checking out would be a very understandable reaction. The irony, which is just my story, our story is that we are more interested in the present, less maybe attached to having to have all the outcomes, but doubling down on the process.

And we haven't gotten it figured out. We're early in our process and we're in no hurry. I will tell you too that I've changed a phrase recently as I'm learning, this is a good example of my grief process, I've been saying, "We've been learning to live with this hole in our heart," as if it was off to the side and you put it in a category and you deal with it on weekends. And I'm now able to say, I'm not quite sure what I mean, but I'm learning to live with this hole in my heart that is shaping me because we know it will never go away, it just becomes a part of our story.


Dr. Greg Jones: Optimism is just kind of trying to pretend every day's getting better. Hope is something that you can sustain through suffering and so your sense of being an agent of hope is accompanied by tears, because we would meet regularly when you were coming back from or getting ready to go visit Lucas again before he died, and I tried to ask you how you were doing and you were always really honest and direct and I would think, how is it that I had tears in my eyes and came away hopeful? How does that journey of tear-stained hope continue to shape how you think about life and vocation and leadership?


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Well, in my field, I've had the privilege of being in that room with all the people who had real tears. And I walked away like you did. I didn't know who was helped. Did I help them or did they help me? And I'm the victim of being acquainted with pain, in this world in general, as we all are, and in a particular angle as a provider. I think this idea of pretending just makes me tired. And with everything going on in the world, aren't we all just tired? Aren't we just dying for genuineness and being directly confrontive with what's really real? Like the limitation of our existence and our deep, deep need for better quality of our current existence? All those things. So I'm all in to get right to those topics and tears are fast-forward measures to get there, not in a manipulative way, but I've chosen just to be direct and honest with how things are hard and let things play out after that.


Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah. You told me about the experience that it was a number of your former residents who were caring for Lucas in the hospital at Vanderbilt, and so it wasn't like you were just handing him over to some abstract medical system in some way. These were people that you had mentored and helped to shape how they understood themselves as a physician and-


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Yeah. Could you imagine how that gave me feedback?


Dr. Greg Jones: Oh, barely.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Well, in medical education, we are excited and absolutely purposed to train up the next generation. And last I checked, none of us gets out of here alive and I get very excited about gifting to others like I was gifted from those patients, from my parents. And so there's been a lot of difficult, hard, meaningful, costly time with these young trainees who paid back or paid forward to me as I was more daddy than I was doctor in that room.


Dr. Greg Jones: Yeah. And yet there's something really powerful about knowing that the kind of care that you've tried to offer to patients as an agent of hope, I'm sure some of that you taught and some of it they caught. In the way, like you watched your dad as you were growing up, one of the things that you talk about for the College of Medicine is a devotion to what you call the fierce work of medicine.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Yeah.


Dr. Greg Jones: And I've watched as you've said it in rooms where I've been in, and whether they're physicians or laypeople, there's a kind of nodding of the head and a kind of, "Oh, that's deep."


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Yeah. Listen, all of us have fierceness of life, all of us, but in the context of talking about thriving and formation and wellness and making sure we stay well, as providers, which is a whole other topic and something that we're working diligently on to address in our training strategies for the College of Medicine, and even thinking about the afterlife, which we've referred to a little bit today, still there's today, which is that thing needs to be excised or that terrible acute intrusive crisis need to be addressed or that chronic, let's say disease needs to be somehow managed in a way that brings us closer to health.

So I don't want to get so familiar with future state of health and wellness to forget the cost that it takes, both to train, to deliver care, to manage the after effects of your investments as a provider after COVID, the mental health taxing thing, the cultural incredible disruptive and disunifying and confusing and terrible things that are going on with regard to health disparities. And I can go on and on. So it's fierce work. It doesn't mean that we're in the room with a patient. It could be that we're just trying to figure out how to correct the system or trying to close the gaps between with the evidence shows we should be doing what we're really doing. Or it may be that we haven't figured out how to interact with each other as healthcare providers and study each other's roles and work this dance to do our steps in fluid ways. All these things are what I am thinking through as pictures of fierceness. So it's taxing, costly, and sobering.


Dr. Greg Jones: It's powerful to hear you say all of that. There's a sense of perseverance that's part of that fierceness that just says, "This is hard and what I need to say to you is hard." I mean I can't imagine you giving the diagnosis to your son. It's not easy to give the diagnosis to a stranger. And I think about, how do you not carry your last conversation into your next conversation? Because there got to be times when you just feel that it's just taken every last ounce of energy you had to get through that room and there's another room 12 feet away.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: I hope that we can augment our future trainees' ability to be self-aware, to read their own signs, to, pardon the pun, diagnose themselves and give themselves permission, fill in the blank, step away, make that referral for someone else to take care of it, understand honestly their limitations. Now, we are going to expect, and we certainly have our experiences of moving further up and in in our training to build amazing capacity and energy, but with guardrails, right? So that's going to be an active conversation and active work that our great team is thinking about even now.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's extraordinary because when I think about the motivations for people to go into medicine and into healthcare, and then the realities of what they often encounter, students need that early training in self-awareness and of the kind of habits and perspectives to really recognize that it is fierce work and that it's a vocation and a calling and you need that deeper sense of purpose, and you're going to need friends alongside you to accompany you.

I had the privilege of engaging you and former governor Bill Haslam, a dear friend of yours, as part of our Hope Summit and we were talking about unlikely friendships. Talk about how friendships help you stay centered and be hopeful.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Well, if you're lucky enough to have friends who know you and then still stick around, you're one fortunate person. Bill Haslam has an amazing ability to listen and to create environments where everyone feels safe. And so it's easy to start being honest and to land that and to percolate that as friends over not that long a time while he was in office here was a real pleasure.

And so everything that he was doing, that I was doing, and some others in a group of friendships that we had was the result of that underpinning of everybody staying on focus with what's really true and important and being committed to one another. Right? So with those guys, Bill in particular, it was okay for the brights to be brighter and the darks to be darker.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. Coming to a close of our time, I want to just ask a couple of practical suggestions. So when Anderson's just worn out, not feeling particularly hopeful, what are you likely to do to rekindle hope?


Dr. Anderson Spickard: I'm active, so that would be hopefully a tennis game or a hike. There's a little guitar that I have, I embarrassingly mention that publicly at Belmont University, 10 minutes a day, I've been doing that for about a year now, and I am a technical musician, meaning I'll do the chords and try to figure out where my fingers belong, but I am very helped by the music that comes from it.


Dr. Greg Jones: It's a reminder it's never too old to pick something up and to do it not because you're going to get paid for it, but do it because it brings you joy and a sense of hope.


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Frankly, that came back to me after Lucas died and it's been a wonderful companion in the last 12 months.


Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. One last question. It's going to take us in a very different direction, and part of what I love about you and admire about you, which is a gift of being a physician, is you so live in the moment and you're so present to any conversation or any person, and yet, as you are leading the launch of this Frist College of Medicine and as a medical educator and in the midst of this long journey, you're also planting trees under whose shade you will not sit. How do you think about your own life and planting in terms of the legacy that you hope to leave for others?


Dr. Anderson Spickard: Yeah. I am a recipient of incredible mentors, really pioneers. I'm not that young, so I am one generation away from that influence, and then I see the opportunity to do it for others. What would give me the most joy is that I wasn't involved at all in seeing that next physician trainee look at that young 12 year old, him or herself, and say, "This is chickenpox." So the legacy I want is to see that it takes and it goes, and I just want to get out of the way.


Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.