Transcript
Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter (0:04)
After my residency ended, I had an idea of my next steps. I'd had so many experiences in my training, watching families navigate the end of a loved one's life. I saw the ways providers around them weren't equipped to help. And I knew I wanted to do something to change the way doctors talk about the end of life. This was years before my father's illness, long before I knew how intimately familiar my family would become with that conversation. And at the time, a new doctor fresh from residency. I was exhausted, I was very burned out. And I took a job as a hospital based doctor, a hospitalist, and actually I was a nocturnist because I only worked the night shift. And I found myself with a lot more free time on my hands and thinking a lot more about how can we make it standard for all doctors in training to get more education around palliative care, more around communication skills. Why don't we treat having conversations about serious illness like we do an appendectomy, where you spend many, many, many hours learning how to do that procedure. We should be spending time learning communication as a procedure. I remember feeling not really sure how to begin, but Ed remembers that time in a different way.
Ed (1:36)
I keep, like trying to censor myself from saying really stupid metaphors. You were like, blooming, like, it was amazing. Like you were coming out of this thing and you were learning all of this stuff. You, like, learned that there had been a financial crisis. You were.
Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter (1:47)
I was like, what, 2008? What's a mortgage crisis?
Ed (1:50)
Yeah, it was wild. And one of those things was you thinking about what you wanted to do next and the things that you'd seen and the opportunity or the challenges. And I remember talking about it in a hundred different ways, and I mean classic for us. I envisioned you making a difference in doing something really cool. I should have known, but did not know how amazing it was going to be.
Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter (2:20)
It started with a documentary film, actually two documentary films. I was chatting with a good friend who's an ICU doctor in the East Bay of Oakland, California, and she mentioned that they were filming a documentary in her ICU and had spent six months or so just following patients and families. My friend told me that the project was stalled. There wasn't enough money to finish it. I was definitely intrigued and I wanted to see what they had. So I got in touch with the director, Dan Krause, and he sent me a link. And I remember being at the hospital, it was a particularly quiet night. So I was sitting in the doctor's lounge and on my iPhone watching this five minute, more of a elongated trailer of the film, which showed the exact kinds of conversations and experiences that had been happening over and over and over. The nuanced kind of discussion about, how do we care for somebody who's this sick? What do they want if time is short here, I am not a super emotional person, and I was crying. So I called the director the next day, and I told him, this film, it needs to be made. I asked if there was anything I could do to help, but Dan wasn't so confident about the film's future. I don't know that this film is going to go anywhere. We don't have funds to finish it. And I just said, well, you know, tell me how much it's going to take and we'll make it happen. And so this was one of the very first things that I personally supported. And then asked my father, actually also if he was interested to be involved because he was dipping his toe into film as well at that point. So we did it together.