Grappling with Grief with author and journalist John DeDakis

Many thanks to John DeDakis for joining me on “The Art of Medicine with Dr. Andrew Wilner.” John is a former CNN Senior Copy Editor who now works as a manuscript editor and one-on-one writing coach. In between, he’s written six political thrillers.

John has had personal struggles with grief-his youngest son died of a heroin overdose, and he lost his sister to suicide. John has become something of an expert and inspiration for people living with grief.

During our 35-minute discussion, John shared his journey from journalism to fiction writing and his approach to incorporating the theme of grief in his novels. Listeners will gain insight into how personal adversity can fuel creative expression and resilience.

John’s books are available on Amazon and at his website: www.johndedakis.com, where you can also learn about his writing coaching services.

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Transcript

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (0:08 - 1:53)

Welcome to the Art of Medicine, the program that explores the arts, business, and clinical aspects of the practice of medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Wilner. I've planned a great program for today, but first, a word from our sponsor, locumstory.com.

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Learn about locums and get insights from real-life physicians, PAs, and NPs at locumstory.com. Today, my guest is John Dodakis. John is a former CNN senior copy editor who now works as a manuscript editor and one-on-one writing coach.

In between, he's written six political thrillers. John has had personal struggles with grief. His youngest son died of a heroin overdose, and he lost his sister from suicide.

John's become something of an expert and inspiration for people living with grief. Welcome John Dodakis. Thanks very much.

It's good to be here. John, so you're an old guy like me. You've got an interesting background, you know, CNN.

I used to watch that Situation Room. That's a classic, and that must have been a lot of fun. You were a journalist.

That was your day job, I guess, for many years. Then you branched into writing fiction, and then you had these personal tragedies. Where do you want ...

How does all that fit together? Where do you want to start?

[John DeDakis] (1:53 - 4:02)

It all fits together, but it's sort of all jumbled together. The personal tragedies happened over a period of time, which is, I think, natural for life. When I was nine, I witnessed a car-train collision that killed three people, including a kid my age.

I think that had an effect on me that found its way into my fiction. I became a journalist after considering going into law. My dad was a lawyer.

The two of us were going to go into practice together, and then I was going to use the law as a stepping stone to get into politics. For the good of the country, I decided to go in a different direction. As far as my parents were concerned, they felt I joined the dark side, because they felt that the press ran Nixon out of the White House.

That was the direction I went in, and I covered the White House when Reagan was president, the last three years of his presidency. I went to CNN in 1988 as a writer, and probably the next plot twist in my life was when they made me an editor. It was tedious.

It was fault-finding, but it paid well. I needed a creative outlet, and that's when I started writing fiction. I drew from personal experience.

By this time, when I wrote my first novel, my sister had taken her life. That, along with the car-train collision, those incidents were the impetus for Fast Track, the first novel. I think it was my third novel, Troubled Water, that came out when I decided to leave CNN.

I was at CNN for 25 years, one of Wolf Blitzer's editors for seven, and then retired from day-to-day journalism in 2013, and basically had a second career as a manuscript editor, a writing coach. It's been having just enough light for the next step, and so I'm loving retirement. I highly recommend it.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (4:03 - 4:10)

Just for those writers out there, publishing your first book, there were some obstacles. You want to tell us about that?

[John DeDakis] (4:10 - 5:05)

Anybody who's interested in writing and getting traditionally published, or even self-published, knows that it's an ordeal. You need to take the long view, because it can become so overwhelming and confusing, because there's so many moving parts that are involved. The first novel I wrote, it took me 10 years to get the agent that I've got.

We're still together after 20 years. My manuscript went through something like 14 major revisions, and she's the 39th agent that I queried. I know of some people who've even taken longer than that, and many more rejections before they found their agent, although nowadays, self-publishing is much more available than it was back then.

I think that, bottom line, if you really want to get your story out there, one way or the other, you can do it.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (5:06 - 5:41)

Yes, I have four published books. Two are traditionally published, and two are self-published, but there's a fifth that's back from the 80s that's still in the box, because there just weren't options. You could what they called vanity publish, which basically meant you paid somebody to print it, and you got 100 copies, and you put them in your garage, and you gave them away.

This is all pre-internet. That wasn't really very appealing, so at least authors do have the option now, but getting noticed is now a challenge.

[John DeDakis] (5:41 - 5:48)

Let me ask you a quick question. Do you have a preference between traditionally published and self-published, based on your experience?

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (5:50 - 6:50)

Yes. Based on my experience, I actually prefer the self-published route, but that's because of me, because I would send these edited copies back to my publisher, and they would come back to me with new errors, new copy editors, and I was like, oh, come on. I didn't find that for the amount of energy within the relationship, that the return was...

And now, of course, well, it's like, well, you need someone to copy edit. Well, now you can outsource that to friends, and people who'll do it by the hour, and AI will help you. There's no reason to have a typographical error anymore.

A lot of the things have been simplified that the publisher used to do, and their real advantage is they can promote it worldwide, which they tend not to do, so... Exactly, right. I don't know.

Your experience has been good, though, with traditional publishers, right?

[John DeDakis] (6:51 - 7:18)

It has. It has, but I think you're right. No matter whether your book nowadays is traditionally published or self-published, you're going to be the one who'll have to market it, unless you're John Grisham, and you don't need the promotion, and then they give you all the promotion you want, but I think that's a big surprise to writers, because writers write, and they don't realize that promoting is part of the process.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (7:20 - 9:43)

All right, well, let's segue back to the art of medicine, because I want to talk about this grief thing. So you're a kid, you see this horrible accident with a kid your age, and I think that really... That's something I'll just talk about for a second.

When you're a medical trainee, like I was for many, many years, you're taking care of people who are mostly older than you. Oh, he's an old guy, he's in his 60s, you're 28 or 32. You don't identify that strongly with them, although I did talk to one young physician who told me that her mother passed away while she was in training, and after that, people her mother's age resonated with her in terms of emotional difficulty with the illness.

But when it's someone your age, it's really sobering, and of course, as we age, more and more people our age get sick and pass away. But a young person, and then suicide, I think, is sort of its own topic, and then family members feel guilty. Is there something else I couldn't have done, I could have done?

That would be, I think, expected. I had a buddy. We were pretty close.

We were diving buddies. He was my age, a few years older, and he had kind of a rocky life. He was a fun guy to be with, but he drank too much and he partied too much.

But he was a musician also, he was very talented, and we had a lot of fun together, and he lived in a different part of the country, and something came up, and I was emailing him, and no answer. And then finally, somebody contacted me and said he'd killed himself, he'd shot himself in the head. And I was like, whoa, and of course, I felt terrible.

Gee, I should have spent a lot more time with Ricky. What was going on? So that's tough for everybody.

And then your son, can you tell us a little bit what happened there, if it's not too hard?

[John DeDakis] (9:43 - 12:12)

Sure, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about him, because suicide and addiction, those are probably two of the most stigmatized topics. And so I do speak a lot about it, and write about it, and I think that by being able to talk about it, it's given other people permission to voice their concerns and their feelings and their experiences.

Because grief, no matter what kind, can be very isolating. Because if the feelings are intense, you can almost feel as if you're the only one feeling this way, and no one else is going to understand. And so in the case of Steven, I mean, he was a funny guy, he was a musician, he was a cook at a high-end restaurant in DC.

And there were some issues, there were some behavior issues, and things weren't right. But I wasn't sure why, until he had an emergency room experience. And I had to go to be with him, and the nurses said, we are very concerned about your son, but we can't tell you why.

And so I went to him, and I said, dude, I can't help you if you won't let them tell me, if you don't tell me what's going on. And so they did more tests, and he didn't really tell me, but when he was about to be discharged, the papers, it was him, the doctor, and me, and he handed me the discharge papers, and one of the things on it was, stop using heroin. I go, what?

And fortunately, I didn't go ballistic. We had a heart-to-heart conversation. And he lied to me, he said he's only done it a couple of times, he'd been using for a year, I found out later.

But he really wanted to get beyond it, he felt he was depressed. And so we tried to look at the depression issue. And so he was trying to schedule a time with a psychologist, and the person's schedule was full, they said call back in two weeks, and a week later he was missing and then dead.

He went missing for a week, and was found dead in my car just a block and a half away from our house. And so... How old was he?

22. 22. So he had...

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (12:13 - 12:17)

The reason they couldn't tell you was he wasn't a minor. Right.

[John DeDakis] (12:17 - 12:21)

The HIPAA laws, you know, they were protecting his privacy.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (12:23 - 12:32)

Whoa. So you had a clue, once you knew he was using, that such a thing was possible.

[John DeDakis] (12:32 - 12:38)

I kind of knew it was not going to end well, because when he went off the grid, that was out of character for him.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (12:41 - 12:44)

And did you feel that you should have done more? Did you feel guilty?

[John DeDakis] (12:45 - 13:29)

Oh, hell yeah. I mean, I went through grief counseling for about two and a half years, and my grief counselor wouldn't let me wallow in guilt. She said, what could you do, nail him to the bed?

I mean, you know, he's an adult. And to a certain extent, that was part of my approach to him. I mean, I didn't want...

I wanted him to take ownership of his disease. I think addiction is a disease. And I felt that he was.

But I think I underestimated the potency of heroin, and I think the insidiousness of addiction. And so, sure, you know, if you want to judge me as a parent, get in line. I got there first.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (13:31 - 15:01)

Well, my sympathy. Thank you. I had a guest on recently, Carolyn Larkin-Taylor, who is a physician, and she wrote kind of a memoir about some of her interesting patients.

But I want to get this right. I think there was one patient similar to your son, and I guess she was asked to see the patient in the ICU because of an overdose and ultimately died, and it was her job to call the parents. And I remember that she was shocked because the parents just said, okay, because this had happened so many times, and that they had pretty much kind of just washed over years of in and out of rehab and in and out of the hospital, that they had finally just kind of...

He was already sort of pretty close to, you know, they washed their hands of him. And I believe there was another story, it was yet another story about addiction, what was a young, attractive, middle-class lady who, you know, had everything, didn't have to work, had tennis lessons in the afternoon, and a few nice kids and working husband who became addicted to nitrous oxide, you know, the dentist's laughing gas. And that causes actually neurologic symptoms over time.

[John DeDakis] (15:02 - 15:03)

And that's your specialty?

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (15:04 - 15:32)

Yes, and I've seen it a few times. It's pretty rare, and it usually is under the radar, right? I mean, you just don't see it.

And she couldn't stop, and she died. You know, it was diagnosed and she was debilitated, you know, from problems with her nerves and thinking and couldn't stop and died. So, you know, these are real problems that we, I guess we just don't know how to...

They're complicated, right? It is.

[John DeDakis] (15:32 - 15:33)

It's very complicated.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (15:33 - 15:55)

Emotional and physical and physiological and chemical, situational, there's so much going on. Yeah. So, did that...

Did you write about this? Did that... I did.

A diary, or was that in your novels, or what happened?

[John DeDakis] (15:55 - 17:58)

All of the above. I'm sort of a chronic journaler. I mean, I've been journaling since I was basically a kid.

You know, they've evolved over the years, but, you know, it's now the primary part of my writing life where I write in my journal in the morning, and the discipline is to look at the day before. How did that go? What did I do?

How did I feel about what I did? And so on. And as all six of the novels have grief and loss as subtexts, because I write as a 20-something young woman, and she has gone through grief, and that becomes part of her identity that influences who she is as a person.

And so, you know, obviously I'm drawing from personal experience, but I'm putting it into a different created character. And so by the time my fourth novel, Bullet in the Chamber, is basically using the collateral damage surrounding my son's disappearance and death, and I use that as a subplot, and the title of the book came from, and the image on the cover is a bullet in a syringe, because I felt that if the cops could make the connection between the fatal dose and the pusher, they should charge the guy with second-degree murder, because in my opinion, it's like selling a pistol with one bullet in the chamber to someone you know is going to play Russian roulette and you don't care. The problem I found when I was researching the novel, though, is that, you know, cops and lawyers tell me that it's not a slam dunk to be able to make that connection, because a lot of pushers, the middle person, the person who actually makes the sale, is also addicted.

And so it's a little harder to hold them responsible in the same way that the pusher is, and usually the Mr. Big isn't addicted. And so getting to that person becomes a lot more difficult.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (17:59 - 18:09)

Yeah, lots of injustice. Do you feel guilty at all that you're using your son's death as a...

[John DeDakis] (18:09 - 19:58)

Yeah, you know, you're the first person who asked that. You know, am I capitalizing on my son's death? And I don't take offense at the question, because I've asked that question of myself, and I've been really careful about that, because, sure, novelists want to sell books, but I'm at a point where the sale of a book is not nearly as important to me as getting the message out, because I teach people how to write, and one of the fundamental things, I believe, is to write what you know, and to mine the pain. We all have pain and loss, and it doesn't even mean it has to be the loss of a loved one. And so I'm finding that I'm much more comfortable and even assertive about being willing to talk about Stephen's story in hopes that it will help other people who have stories to tell to dig more deeply into themselves and to tell it.

And one of the things that I feel especially strong about is that I think that men, I don't want to generalize, I can only talk from my own personal experience, you know, we tend to bottle it up. You know, we're okay, you know, I'm tough, I can, you know, gut it through and all that, and yet, you know, women, in my experience, get it. You know, crying is an emotional safety valve, as opposed to keeping it inside.

Keeping it inside is one way of dealing with it, but it doesn't really make it go away, it festers, and it's corrosive. And if you think about it, just about every mass shooter is a guy. And my hunch is, and I'd be interested in your observation, my hunch is that in each of these cases, there's unresolved grief and anger to the point where the tears have become bullets.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (20:01 - 21:43)

I think it's a pretty good theory. You know, I had another guest on this show who started something called 21st Century Dads, which is a national organization that's been very, very successful to match fathers who have children with special needs. Because women tend to have support systems and are more emotionally open, and as you point out, man, that's just not the style of many men.

Right. And in these, you know, when there's a child with special needs, there's stresses on the marriage, there's stresses on the finances, which are often the responsibility of the father, and the return is different in terms of the relationship with the child. And he started this organization that's been very, very successful to give men a space to not necessarily be angry, but, you know, they're either grieving, that's not the kid I wanted, right?

Sure. And how do I deal with this and how do we, you know, how do we function as a family? How do we be happy?

Right. How do we pay for it? You know, there's a lot of questions that your average guy has nobody to ask, right?

Who's he going to ask? You know, his wife doesn't know the answers, his boss doesn't care, you know, who are you going to ask? So I think, well, as the French pointed out a long time ago, there are differences between men and women.

Right? There are a lot of different ones. So I think that's interesting that you've incorporated that.

[John DeDakis] (21:44 - 23:06)

There's one discovery I made about the grief process that I think may speak to this as well. Well, my wife and I were in the car maybe a month or two after Stephen died and there was a CD player, we had a CD player and there was a song that came on. And as soon as it came on, Cindy hit the button to advance it to the next track.

And I said to her, why did you do that? And she said, every time I hear that song, it makes me cry. Turns out it was the same song that when I heard it, I would hit repeat because it made me cry.

Same song, same emotional reaction, different way of dealing with it. And that was instructive. And I think that it's probably why Cindy and I are still together after almost 48 years, because the death of a child can doom a relationship.

But we, I think, instinctively knew that we weren't going to be able to fix the other person. You know, grief, that kind of grief especially, is just too staggering and too overpowering so that you really need to deal with it separately because, you know, comparing your grief to your spouse, you know, snap out of it, you're not doing it right, is not helpful. And somehow we were able to get through it because we had our own separate support systems.

And that enabled us, I think, to survive.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (23:08 - 24:15)

Well, you know, it's hard to escape some sort of grief in this human existence. You know, parents get sick and die, friends get sick and die. You may find that you are sick and dying.

I just interviewed a guy in the episode preceding yours who was just living his life. He's in his mid-50s. Everything's cool.

And he went for his checkup and his blood count was a little low. And long story short, it turned out he had multiple myeloma, which, you know, started a whole journey of chemo and stem cell transplant. But he's, you know, he's still surviving and he's writing books about it and he's donating money to the Multiple Myeloma Society.

And, you know, he's, I think, leaning into it, you know, rather than just saying that I don't, you know, don't talk about it. So I see you're doing, taking a similar approach.

[John DeDakis] (24:16 - 24:45)

And I've had people come to me, you know, who are freshly bereaved and they say, you know, does time heal? Does it ever get any better? And one of the things I tell them is that, you know, what's happening to you right now obviously is intense.

But you know, if you take the long view, five years from now, you'll have an answer for someone who comes to you and says, does it get any better? So in a sense, you are being prepared to be a comfort and an encouragement to someone else.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (24:47 - 25:11)

I've heard a lot of people who have experienced tragedy of one sort of another find comfort in helping others. Yeah. I guess that's just a human thing, but it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because if you ask questions like, you know, hey, why me? Right. Why?

Why my family? Why? Why us?

[John DeDakis] (25:12 - 27:36)

It's tough to come up with an answer. If there is no answer, that's the problem. And so you sit with it for a while and you need to feel those feelings.

And because that's natural. It's all about you because the feelings are so intense. I mean, I can remember being and this is not a unique experience, you know, being so offended that other people were laughing and going about their day.

And it's like, you know, don't they realize my world has ended? You know, I mean, now I'm able to laugh and there's there's actually joy in my life again. But man, when you're going through it, you've got tunnel vision.

It's like that's that's that's the only thing you can think of. It's it's everything else is a blur. Who is Lark Chadwick?

Ah, Lark. Lark is my alter ego. I write as a woman, not in any kind of calculated way.

When I first started writing fiction, someone suggested that I should write in a way that stretches who I am. Never been a wise, a stretch. Well, you know what, though?

It's not as much of a stretch as one might think, because what I discovered when I tried writing as a woman is that I discovered this is probably no breaking news. Emotions are not gender specific. We all have the exact same emotions.

It's just that in my experience, the women in my life are more willing to share their emotions and they're more articulate about them when they share them. And I worked at CNN for 25 years, surrounded by young women in their early to mid 20s who would let me ask them questions about what it's like to be a woman. And they would tell me about their boyfriends, their careers, their jobs, their families.

And then they became and many of them became my beta readers. They would read early drafts and let me know if I'm getting it right or wrong. I can remember one anchor I worked with.

She was gorgeous. And I remember asking her, what's it like for guys to come on to you all the time? And she said, I can tell in the first 20 seconds if I'm safe.

I never have to worry about being safe in a conversation. And that's when I learned one little tidbit is that being a woman means playing defense. So I think guys can learn a lot by asking women about their lives and then shutting up and listening.

We tend to mansplain.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (27:37 - 27:47)

I think a lot of guys are going to rush out and buy your books. Well, where where where are I assume your books are on Amazon and your website?

[John DeDakis] (27:48 - 28:10)

Anywhere you want to go, you can get them. You probably the best places through my website, which is my name dot com. J.O.H.N. D as in dog. E.D. as in dog. A.K.I.S. As in Sam. It's got the books.

It's got the the teaching events that I'm going to be doing, the speaking I do. Yeah. And you can get through to me by email through my website as well.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (28:11 - 28:18)

So are you open to people contacting you if they have a grief or other kind of scenario they think you might be helpful?

[John DeDakis] (28:18 - 29:02)

Sure. Although, let's be real. I'm not a psychologist.

I'm not a trained professional. I mean, I can be an ear, you know, but don't make me don't expect that you're going to come away from the conversation feeling like, you know, well, I've got that figured out. But, you know, I'm probably more helpful when it comes to people who would like to take those stories and mold them into something.

I help people write memoirs, novels. I teach a class on writing as a way to heal, because, you know, journaling, poetry, any number of creative outlets can be a way to tap into the pain and mine it and mold it and get beyond it.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (29:04 - 29:08)

So you were actually writing fiction while you were doing the news.

[John DeDakis] (29:09 - 29:32)

Yeah. Yeah, it was. I started writing in 1994.

I was still in Atlanta working overnights. And the first novel got published in 2005, right when I was moving from Atlanta to D.C. So and then, you know, was continuing to write while I was working with Wolf.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (29:32 - 29:44)

Now, as a journalist, a retired journalist, do you give it given all the journalistic opportunities out there today, do you regret that you're not still in the fray?

[John DeDakis] (29:45 - 31:11)

No, I don't. Because I think covering the Trump administration especially, it's like it's covering a fire hose of lies. And, you know, how do you even fact check when, you know, where do you start?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, it's just a blizzard. And I mean, my wife says they need to, you know, tell him where he's.

Well, sometimes you need to just kind of catch your breath and go back and say, did he really solve eight wars? You know, and then you have to kind of go back and look at the record and find out what the facts are. So, no, I don't miss it.

And yet journalism is one of the sub is a subtext for all of the novels just because I write what I know. And so three of the novels are set at the White House. I covered the White House when Reagan was president.

And so and again, I wasn't these were not meant to be political polemics. I just felt that journalism is something that people don't understand. And who knew it was going to be nearly as controversial as it is?

And so I think reading my novels would give people a better understanding of how journalism operates. And it's not perfect. It's made up of people who make mistakes and some of them are not altruistic.

And so it's been great grist for fiction, but it's also, I think, a good understanding of, you know, a lot of a lot of what goes on behind the scenes that people don't understand.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (31:12 - 32:17)

A lot of people don't know that I worked full time as a medical journalist for 10 years. I didn't know that. For whom?

Well, I was freelance. And at that time, there were many, many outlets. There would be these free news magazines that were, you know, print that were distributed with typically pharmaceutical ads that needed content, which they would get from the latest medical meeting.

And so I traveled all over the world to medical conferences to, you know, what's the latest treatment for stroke or multiple sclerosis? And I would follow the topics and I knew all of the experts. And, you know, being a physician myself, I was I could read between the lines, you know, when there was a presentation.

So I did that for 10 years and I wrote a lot for Medscape and I still work for them. It's more than 25 years now. And then I went back into clinical practice at the end of the 10 years.

But I was sort of gallivanting about the country and few international sites.

[John DeDakis] (32:18 - 32:25)

And yet you had to run your copy through editors, you know, who had to say, where did you get this? How do you know it's true? Right.

Yes.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (32:25 - 32:58)

Yes, I did have editors. And most of the time we had a pretty good relationship. But oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about now.

You know, your day, though, now is so different. You get up, you know, wash up, get a cup of coffee, sit down with your journal, you know, write for an hour or two. It's like, OK, I'm going to go back.

I'm going to start thinking about my next chapter in my novel. You know, and when you were working as a as a journalist, you had to drive to work and, you know, get dressed and say hi to everybody, which was is that a big transition?

[John DeDakis] (32:59 - 34:36)

It can be. And fortunately, and I think part of it depends on your temperament. I mean, I'm a I'm a shy extrovert with introvert tendencies, which means I'm during Covid.

I was fine down here in my little grotto. And yet there's a part of me that is social and does need, you know, interaction with other people. So, yes, it was a big transition, although the interesting thing is I did overnights at CNN for so long.

I only need five hours of sleep now. You know, you'll probably be the well, you'll probably be. One of my friends, Steve Rasmus, was he's retired now, but he was a neurologist who specialized in sleep deprivation.

And I remember going to him and I said, dude, you know, I only sleep like five hours and don't you need like eight hours? And he said, well, you need REM sleep. And he said, what's that?

He said, well, it's dream sleep. And I said, well, I get that. He said, well, you're fine.

And I said, well, what does it mean if I can sleep for like twenty five minutes and wake up refreshed? And he said, it means you're a good napper. And so I never worried about sleep again.

So now, in fact, today I got up at two fifteen in the morning because I'd already been asleep for five hours. Why toss and turn just because it's the middle of the night when you can get up and be productive? And so I'll take desk doses here and at my desk from time to time.

But I get a lot more done. And so I'm in a I'm in a good place, I feel. But, you know, you're the doctor.

I mean, you know, am I at risk? Am I? And, you know, do I need to be and I only can go on either one or two cups of coffee and that's it.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (34:38 - 35:02)

You know, it turns out that there is a lot of individual variability in how much sleep a person needs. And as you point out, the eight hours is sort of the median. Right.

But there are people and I knew one of them who could function perfectly. And every day I'm four hours asleep, so go to bed at midnight, wake up at four.

[John DeDakis] (35:03 - 35:03)

Yeah.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (35:04 - 35:58)

And she felt great. And if she slept longer than that. She felt ill.

That was normal for her. And so she had like two careers because she really had all this extra time and, you know, she'd be at the gym at four thirty and, you know, done by six thirty and, you know, go look for something else to do. And then there are other people that need, you know, nine.

Otherwise they're groggy all day. And that's pretty much genetics. And you just kind of have to find what what works for you.

It sounds like you found it. And yeah, there's no reason to go to some arbitrary goal. You know, everybody's different along those lines.

Now, if you're stumbling and not feeling well, I mean, most people just do not sleep enough because life these days has a lot of distractions. Well, they say, listen to your body, right? Right.

Yeah. Your body. I used to tell my dad because we talk about this.

Your body is always right.

[John DeDakis] (36:01 - 36:08)

Yeah. Even when it's going haywire, it tells you I'm going haywire. Your body is your body.

OK.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (36:08 - 36:14)

John, it's been a great and fun and interesting conversation. Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap up?

[John DeDakis] (36:15 - 36:40)

I don't think so. You've you've made me think and you've we've covered a lot of ground that a lot of interviews don't cover because, you know, you you you were brave and asked me some, you know, challenging questions that are important ones to ask, especially about, you know, about Steven. So I appreciate just the opportunity, you know, to talk with you and your audience and, you know, we'll take it from there.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (36:42 - 36:48)

I'm really glad that you enjoyed the experience as much as I did, and I'm sure the audience will, too.

[John DeDakis] (36:48 - 36:49)

Thank you.

[Andrew Wilner, MD] (36:49 - 39:24)

John Dadakis, thanks for joining me on the Art of Medicine. And now a final thanks to our sponsor, LocumStory.com. LocumStory.com is a free, unbiased educational resource about locum tenens. It's not an agency. LocumStory exists to answer your questions about the how to's of locums on their website, podcast, webinars and videos. They even have a locums 101 crash course at LocumStory.com.

You can discover if locum tenens make sense for you and your career goals. What makes LocumStory.com unique is that it's a peer to peer platform with real physicians sharing their experiences and stories, both the good and bad, about working locum tenens, hence the name Locum Story. LocumStory.com is a self-service tool that you can explore at your own pace with no pressure or obligation. It's completely free. Thanks again to LocumStory.com for sponsoring this episode of the Art of Medicine. I'm Dr. Andrew Wilner. See you next time. This program is hosted, edited and produced by Andrew Wilner, MD, FACP, FAAN. Guests receive no financial compensation for their appearance on the Art of Medicine.

Andrew Wilner, MD, is a professor of neurology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, Tennessee. Views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this program belong solely to Dr. Wilner and his guests and not necessarily to their employers, organizations, other group or individual. While this program intends to be informative, it is meant for entertainment purposes only.

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