Back to the 1980s: Getting a biopsy during a hospital cyberattack with a little help from a Jesuit exercise and a Jewish novelist

As soon as I checked in at the registration desk in the main lobby at HSHS St. John’s, I knew this hospital visit was going to be different. Normally when I check in at a doctor’s office, I give my name, the receptionist calls up my file and I give my date of birth or Social Security number to verify I’m who I say I am. I scribble my name and initials on an electronic signature pad, and I’m good to go.

This time, I was given a blank form on paper, and I had to fill it out from scratch. Name, address, next of kin, all the information that would have been a mouse click away. A couple of weeks before, at the end of August, the 15 HSHS (Hospital Sisters Health System) hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin were hit with a cyberattack that knocked out their IT and communication systems.

By the time my procedure was scheduled in early September, things were getting back to normal. The phones were working. But patient records weren’t available. So I had to have a new CT scan, since the one we were following up on couldn’t be accessed.

And it took forever to get labs taken, since the paperwork ordering bloodwork – on actual paper for the first time in years – went missing for a while and had to be hand-delivered to the lab. (I sympathize. Slips and sheets of paper routinely disappear in my home office, and I have learned if I want to be able to find something again, to post it to my blog where I can find it with a keyword search.) I was told younger nurses and doctors hadn’t deal with paper paperwork before — it was like going back to the 1980s (but without the DeLorean).

In spite of the outage, my new CT scan and biopsy went smoothly. I thought there was a sense of controlled chaos in the air – I was reminded at times of the old M*A*S*H shows on TV – and I felt like we were all making the best of a suboptimal situation.    

So my hat’s off to the people at St. John’s. I was scared – a biopsy isn’t the kind of thing you take lightly, and frankly this one scares hell out of me – but they inspired confidence. I tend to defuse fear and anger with humor, and the nurses and techs joined in when I tried to wisecrack in the operating room. Some of the banter reminded me of M*A*S*H, too.

Something else that helps me defuse fear (and might help with anger, too, now that I think about it) is a meditation by Brendan McManus SJ and Jim Deeds of Belfast, in a book appropriately titled Deeper into the Mess: Praying Through Tough Times. It goes like this:

Take some time to pray with the problem, acknowledging that excessive fear is not what God wants and asking for help to overcome it. Pray for a specific grace or gift from God, the ability to overcome fear in order that we can carry out God’s will and use our gifts in the service of others.

That focus on service to others is central to Jesuit spirituality, as I understand it, and when I’m scared it helps me to remember it’s not all about me. (Or when I’m angry? Probably. I’ll have to think about that, too.) Either way, it helps me refocus away from self-pity and resentments. McManus and Deeds also suggest a breathing exercise:

Take a deep breath and hold it for a few seconds. Feel your chest fill up with air. Feel the tightness in your muscles. Experience this as the fullness of God’s love for you. Breathe out and say confidently, “I will not fear. God is with me.”

McManus and Deeds suggest you do the exercise at home. Me? I did it when they were wheeling me down to the operating room, more precisely the room where the CT scanner is housed. I was awake for the whole thing, trying to chat and swapping lame wisecracks with the surgical team, and it was over in just a few minutes.

Since they’d given me a local anesthetic, I brought along a book to read while they kept me for observation after the procedure. Titled Conversations with Chaim Potok, it was a collection of printed interviews with Chaim Potok, a novelist whom I read avidly in grad school and have returned to in the last few weeks.

Potok was raised in an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in New York City, but he found that tradition too confining. After yeshiva, a high school devoted to studying the Talmud, he was ordained as a middle-of-the-road Conservative rabbi, and studied English lit and philosophy in grad school at Penn. (He got a PhD.) His struggles to reconcile his religious faith with the modern world, especially the worlds of academia and science, remind me of my own.

So I’ve been reading though his backlist. That’s why I had the book with me in the hospital.

In a 1992 essay reprinted from Inside, a quarterly published by the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, Potok told an interviewer he never stopped studying the Talmud:

It’s an ongoing exploration, says Potok of his talmudic studies. I don’t understand fully what my relationship is to the universe and to God. At times, it’s an open and full relationship. At times, it’s silent and withdrawn. I believe that we live in an imperfect world created by an errant God, and our task is to try to perfect it.

That I can relate to. That’s my relationship to the universe, and to God, in a nutshell.

When Potok speaks of an “errant God,” I think he means the God of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, who creates Adam and Eve, the God who despairs of his creation and sends a flood to destroy life on earth, but spares Noah and enough breeding stock to repopulate the animal kingdom. And what does Noah do? He goes out and gets drunk. I think Potok means the God of the Hebrew Bible who makes a covenant with the tribes of Judah and Israel to follow his commandments and serve as a light for the nations, but repeatedly sees them go whoring after false gods and otherwise violating the covenant.

In another interview, with Michael J. Cusick in Mars Hill Review, a literary magazine published by a Baptist university in North Carolina, Potok elaborated:

That’s the role of God in history — making plans and seeing those plans foiled. There’s constant tension between God and the human beings he has created. That’s not a terribly glorious picture of a deity, is it? Well, that’s the God that we relate to, the Jews anyway.

It’s also an image of God I can relate to. In the same interview Potok contrasted it with the omnipotent God of the universe or the Ground of Being that I read about in 20^th– and 21^st-century theology:

The God utterly infinite, utterly unapproachable, utterly spiritual – we don’t hear of that God. That God won’t turn to us. It is inconceivable that he would ever turn to us. That God is all that ever was and is and will be, into infinity and eternity. How could that God conceivably relate to us. It is the God of the Bible that we relate to!

So I can’t make the step beyond creation to the infinite God. But I can certainly relate to the God of the Bible. I talk to him all the time and complain all the time.

What Potok is saying here, that I can relate to. I have to think about it. I don’t know if I agree with all of it – I don’t agree with myself about half the time – but I can sure relate to it.

Links and Citations

Sean Crawford, “HSHS says system outage caused by cyberattack,” NPR Illinois, 91.9 UIS, Sept. 2, 2023 https://www.nprillinois.org/health-harvest/2023-09-02/hshs-says-system-outage-caused-by-cyberattack

Michael  J. Cusick, “Giving Shape to Turmoil: A Conversation with Chaim Potok,” in Walden, Conversations, pp. 130-31.

Judges 2:17 https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Judges-2-17/ “And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the LORD; but they did not so.”

Brendan McManus SJ and Jim Deeds, Deeper into the Mess: Praying Through Tough Times (Dublin: Messenger Communications, 2019), pp. 74-75.

Marcia Zoslaw Siegal, “The Prime of Chaim Potok,” in Walden, Conversations, p. 98.

Ron Southwick, “HSHS, Prevea Health work to recover from cyberattack,” Chief Healthcare Executive, Sept. 8, 2023 https://www.chiefhealthcareexecutive.com/view/hshs-prevea-health-work-to-recover-from-cyberattack

Daniel Walden, ed., Conversations with Chaim Potok (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

Wikipedia articles: Back to the Future (Franchise), Conservative Judaism, Ground of Being, Hasidic Judaism, Mars Hill University, M*A*S*H (TV series), Chaim Potok, and Yeshiva. Also my post “Tuning a dulcimer (and an aside, dear reader, on how a blog is like the old-fashioned oak filing cabinet in my home office),” in my old blog Hogfiddle, July 18, 2006 https://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/2006/07/tuning-dulcimer-and-aside-dear-reader.html.

[Published Sept. 16, 2023]