Human Potential: A Conversation with Dave deBronkart
“I want to get back to where I was when I was sick. Isn’t that weird?” For someone who was diagnosed with and survived Stage IV, Grade 4 renal cell carcinoma at a very late stage, yes. That sounds weird.
Much has been written about Dave deBronkart – known online as “e-Patient Dave” – and his advocacy for the movement known as Participatory Medicine. Unabashed in his views regarding the evolution of health care, Dave has one of the leading voices in the growing e-patient community. He has said many times that until now, he’d never felt that he had a calling – that this advocacy is something he “can’t get away from.” But it wasn’t always this way. The quote above, from December 2007, was part of a blog post in which Dave poignantly wrote about his sudden lack of direction after surviving his cancer. The sentiment struck me – regaining a future, as Dave so miraculously had, also meant losing a sense of urgency in life.
“Nobody in all the discussions I’ve had with people, nobody has brought this up,” Dave said. He sounded appreciative. “This gets down to the core of being alive.”
Before he was an e-Patient – before he was even a cancer patient – Dave deBronkart studied at Landmark Education. Part of what he calls his “personal training,” Dave took courses in self-improvement, focusing on human potential. “What they do is applied existentialism,” he told me. “They put it in everyday language of ‘Who are you going to be in the moment?’” Quick to be self-deprecating, he said “It just sounds weird, like ‘Who are you going to be for Halloween?’ But one of the key things in existentialism is the authentic person. Authentic, not in the sense of lying or telling the truth, but being authentically present in the moment. You can be a complaint. You can be a possibility. You can be the creation of something new in the world.”
It’s one thing to read his blog or his frequent Twitter updates, but speaking to this man, it is clear that human potential is at the heart of what makes e-Patient Dave tick. When he talks about his job in software marketing, Dave is wide-eyed (“I should have been in the hi-tech game for my whole career!”) When he talks about Participatory Medicine, he is earnest (“When you are an empowered, engaged patient, you start to realize that you’re actually more responsible for your health than you ever thought.”) But get him talking about his potential, or the person he chooses to be, and there is a true confidence. It is refreshing. And it might have saved his life.
“I have no doubt that how I chose to write in my cancer journal on CaringBridge had something to do with my outcome. I don’t claim that by saying the right incantations, I can cause my cancer cells to go away – all I know is that my back was against the wall. I was, quite literally, living as if my life depended on it.’”
And then his life was spared. More from his blog post in December 2007:
“What’s it gonna take to be so present that I reliably do what I said I was gonna do? I say I’m going to practice singing then I do something else. Three days later I say I’m going to pay my bills, then I do something else. The point isn’t that I’m being ‘bad’ when this happens. It’s not that I ‘should’ pay my bills that day, or sing that day. The point is that I said I was going to, and I meant it – so what the heck happened??”
Here was a man who suddenly had time again. And he thought he was wasting it. “The question that really arose was ‘What am I, what will I do?’”
Everyone knows what Dave deBronkart has gone on to do. He’s found the urgency in life again. And that’s the reason I’m really writing this post. In our conversation he told me about the future being a blank slate, “a wide open field, not at all full of the things you held as belief.” Like being diagnosed with cancer. Like surviving it.
“We spent Christmas last year in the Newport, Rhode Island area. We visited a friend and we stayed at a little timeshare where we had to use up some time. So a cold, wet, rainy Christmas is not the ideal time to use up your resort points, but that’s what we did. But get this – as I was driving back to the place we were staying one evening, it was just crummy and cold and raining and yuck, and I actually had a sense of ‘Holy crap. I get to see that it’s cold and rainy in Newport, Rhode Island on December 24, 2008.’ I wouldn’t have known that if I’d died.”
If the future is ours for the taking, Dave asks, “Who are you going to declare yourself to be?”
Good question. What is our potential, and are we living up to it? Having a career dedicated to improving Health Care, it can be easy to forget what those two words actually mean. Ultimately – living. Living as long and as well as we can.
