The House Call

As a passion project — my little "fill-in-the-tank" side gig — I do not-for-profit work where I often go to people in need, at their preferred location, to make healthcare accessible when it otherwise might be impossible.

Recently, the sister of a colleague reached out to me. Her son had just graduated out of the pediatric age range, and she wondered if I could take a quick look at him and make sure everything seemed okay.

How hard can it be? I thought.

It would be another quick, in-and-out visit. I'd examine him, give his mother a clean sheet of her loved one's health, or perhaps guide them in the right direction if something needed attention.

That was what I thought.

The Encounter

As soon as I entered their home, I was greeted by the warmest smile — carried by tired but purposeful eyes. The kind of eyes that tell you, without saying a word, that this mother's entire world revolves around her amazing son.

I complimented the neighborhood, the beautiful country setting, the impeccable interior of their recently built home.

Then, out of habit, I rushed to introduce myself to her son — my patient.

What happened next was one of the most painful things I have witnessed all year.

Our mistake was simple, but consequential: we had not set the stage for a new person entering his home, in a new situation, asking something unfamiliar of him.

And my bright red doctor bag certainly didn't help.

• •The outburst.
• •The anger.
• •The struggle.
• •The fear.

And then the punches — to his own mother.

I froze.

For all the years of experience, training, exams, patients, emergencies, and situations I thought had prepared me for difficult moments, I suddenly realized how inadequately prepared I was for this one.

No. Years of experience and training didn't count here.

I had just finished a 30-minute motorcycle ride out to this country home. I was warmed up, mentally and physically, ready to walk in and do what I knew how to do.

But this little soul? He never got his warm-up.

Someone unfamiliar had suddenly walked into the one place where he was supposed to feel completely safe, carrying a red doctor bag, approaching him as though he should somehow understand what was about to happen.

He hadn't been prepared for me.

Totally on me.

A Different Kind of Lesson

And then I watched his mother.

The patience.

There are things medicine teaches you, and then there are things another human being teaches you simply by allowing you to witness their life.

Watching this mother left me numb. Speechless.

I had no clever medical words. No reassuring explanation. No clinical pearl to offer.

Just a small gesture of compassion — and maybe a couple of tears gathering quietly at the corners of my eyes.

What followed — the examination, the consoling, the comforting, the extraordinary work required to accomplish what would ordinarily be an incredibly ordinary physical exam — made me feel smaller than I have ever felt.

And despite finding all the usual, reassuring things on his physical exam, absolutely nothing about this encounter felt "normal" to me.

Perhaps because I am not used to this normal.

This is their normal.

Rethinking "Normal"

I have friends whose families have traveled their own journeys through autism and other parts of the "spectrum." Somewhere in my mind, I believed that meant I understood enough. That I could handle it. Or at least that I could attempt to.

Today taught me otherwise.

Something in my heart changed after this encounter. Something moved. Something skipped.

And something stayed behind in that house.

It made me realize how deficit we are as a society when it comes to caring for this other "normal" population — especially when children become adults and suddenly graduate out of systems built around them.

I put "normal" in quotation marks intentionally.

Because think about what we do with the people society calls "normal."

Every day, we examine "normal" human beings and try our hardest to find something abnormal about them. A blood pressure. A lab value. A symptom. A scan. Something we can name, label, treat, change.

Perhaps because finding an abnormality gives us the comfort of believing there is something we can do about it.

But really, though?

The "normal" ones spend their lives chasing abnormalities. And sometimes the special, gifted ones spend theirs trying to chase away the so-called "normal" people who enter their world and fill it with unnecessary abnormalities.

A Pure Mind

I often think about children and the clean slate they begin life with. As they grow, that slate slowly fills with "normal perceptions."

Expectations. Judgments. Assumptions. Pretensions. Ideas about what success looks like, what intelligence looks like, how a person should speak, behave, dress, socialize, respond, and exist.

And sometimes I wonder:

What if a mind never became spoiled by all those assumptions and pretensions?

What if some part of it remained as pure as the day we were born?

Well… I met a mind like that today.

He is 18 years old. And I'm not sure I have encountered a mind more pure.

The Scars We Don't See

When it was finally time for me to leave, I shook his mother's hand. She hugged me.

Perhaps she sensed the compassion in my heart. Perhaps she saw that something in me had changed during those few hours.

And then I noticed her arms.

The scars. The marks. The injuries left behind by struggles and meltdowns — the physical evidence of one mother's daily attempt to find that impossibly fine balance with what the rest of us call "normal."

Those marks stayed with me.

I got back on my motorcycle and started the 35-minute ride home. Country roads stretched ahead of me, but my mind stayed behind in that house.

For those 35 minutes, my heart was full.

• •Full of gratitude.
• •Full of humility.
• •Full of admiration for a mother whose strength I could never adequately put into words.
• •Full of respect for families quietly living lives most of us know almost nothing about.
• •Full of the uncomfortable realization that perhaps our definition of "normal" has been backward all along.

I rode out there thinking I was going to examine an 18-year-old. Instead, that 18-year-old examined something in me.

And somewhere along those country roads, with the motorcycle humming beneath me and the afternoon replaying over and over in my head, I realized something:

Today, I may have met the most "normal" 18-year-old I have ever met.

And I am grateful that, for a few hours, he allowed me into his world.