Psychiatry - l'homme que riut

I shadowed Dr. Meissner in the Behavioral Health wing of the Naftzger clinic after my week with Dr. Garza.

Dr. Meissner finished his psychiatry residency in June of 2019 at 70 years old. In the past he has served as an ER hospitalist, a cardiologist, and specialized in bioinformatics for the military to pay for medical school. An entire side of his business card is reserved to list his great number of certifications, board memberships, and degrees; totaling 47 letters after his name in licensure (MD, RDCS, etc). 

At one point in the week, he invited me to his house up in the El Paso mountains, where I got to be around dogs. We talked about how he got to where he was, and asked me about myself, we found similarities in our Catholic upbringings. Although he pointed out that his more orthodox Turkish sect of Catholicism would have found my previous Marianist faith heretical.

We talked about his theoretical orientation as a therapist and how the best job he’d ever had was training hunting dogs when he was in high school. He only wrote in purple pen and had a personal library which reached all the way up his high ceiling. He has an analytical, military demeanor, and a well-tended zen garden.

During my time in the office, I was allowed access to psychiatric case files. Dr. Meissner took care to utilize both Latinic technical vocabulary and to portray the life story, pharmacological history, and impression of the patient- making what is generally tender, taboo information casual data.

My week with Dr. Meissner finished with the first Texan snow of the season. A thick sheet of ice formed on my windshield overnight. In my scraping, I thought about what it means to be a professional, what had been reflected to me to me that week. I thought about Meissner and the behind-the-scenes- if I liked it.

February 25th, 2020