Human brain-filled classroom - not an average day for an average performer, which is precisely why I adore the recent performing I've been doing for future doctors through the Gold Foundation.

I created BALL (a solo play about my personal bout with testicular cancer) two years ago as a purely theatrical venture, and could have never imagined performing for medical students and using my text as quote-unquote teaching material.  But it's an honor, and a thrill, getting the opportunity to engage medical students with humor, with bawdiness, and with a patient's honest perspective.

As a recent university graduate, I was often told to treasure my special kind of talents:  my ability to write in hopes of illuminating part of the human condition.  I was told that all types of intelligence are equal, that brain surgeons and clarinetists and aerospace engineers and basketweavers  just have different skill sets, and none were more important or "brainy" than another. I, however, never bought this.  There's something objectively "smarter" about doctors, I knew that.  I trusted that.  And as a cancer patient in 2001-2002, I was comforted by the fact that those operating on me and prescribing me chemotherapy were, quantitatively, the smartest people in the room.   

That said, what, exactly, do I have to give to these young doctors?  I thought about this question nervously, excitedly, on my way to University of Florida's Medical School - the first school in which I was speaking to a class after I had performed.  I had done the show the night before and people seemed to like it - they laughed at the right moments and seemed appropriately affected by my trauma, but now a class... What did I have to give?

Because the room was, um, occupied, we moved the discussion group outside to the lawn, like a class of eager 5th graders.  Very quickly I realized what I could give medical studnets - a space away from the room filled with brains.  As we started, students got so excited to be talking about their fears, their feelings and their discomfort.  For most of it, I don't think I even had to be there - there was so much movement and openness among students. 

We barely talked about my play, but instead talked about how to be with ill people, how a person receives bad news, and how doctors should feel free to be themselves with their patients.  The fact that I was there with free food provided was just a catalyst for the more important work they all needed (and desperately wanted) to do. 

To cancer-survivor Brian, I was always satisfied by the image of medical students spending four years chained to their books, becoming perfectly knowledgeable about the body and its (dis)functions.  Get me in, get me better, get me out, that's what I want - or, rather, what I wanted.  I now realize, however, that for all of us to be fully human, we must all be talking about our fears, our expectations and our comfort - not just patients', not just survivors'.  In a time of high health care costs and internet diagnoses, it is essential for doctors to reflect on their own work as well as to think of their patient and how best to serve a person with illness. 

I watched a group of fourth year medical students do this - to be vulnerable in front of their peers and ask challenging questions of each other.  I don't think I even had to be there - I was just a delicious excuse.