The piano ain’t got no wrong notes:  Thelonious Monk

Recently, I took care of a patient in his late 50s, who was clearly in a difficult struggle in his life. He was homeless, and was found by emergency personnel behind a trash dumpster —dehydrated, malnourished, in shock, kidney failure and had suffered a remote myocardial infarction. (Heart attack)

He ended up on my service as an attending in the Intensive Care Unit.  He was quite thin and malnourished, clearly withdrawn and not communicating. We gave him intravenous fluids, antibiotics, electrolyte replacement and other treatments, but he didn’t’ seem to be responding. If he did respond to me, or the nursing staff, it would be in a few garbled, unintelligible words that we could not understand.  He refused to eat, so I had the staff place a feeding tube in his nose, and he then promptly pulled that out, and curled back into the fetal position to be left alone, apparently, to die.

The concerned nurse came to me and asked me to try to talk to him, and try to understand what his wishes were: for us to treat him and let him live, or to die in peace, if that was his wish.  His name was Thelonious, and that struck a chord in my soul it seems.  I came to his room and was about to ask him what his wishes were about aggressiveness of care, and whether he wished to live or die, but instead, something in side me changed the words that flew out of my mouth.

I Immediately thought of the jazz musician, Thelonious Monk, now deceased.  I am not sure where I learned his name or how it suddenly jumped into my memory.  Perhaps remotely in my experience, I had remembered his name and that he was a jazz musician, back in the early, popular days of jazz. So, I asked my patient, (last name withheld), “Thelonious, do you know or remember Thelonious Monk”?

With that, he suddenly opened his eyes and looked widely at me, then the nurse, said nothing, and then started humming a tune. At first, I thought it was gibberish or nonsense, and then, I could feel the rhythm, and the notes coming through.  It clearly was a song!  After that, the patient suddenly perked up, and started eating the food that was brought to him.  He seemed renewed somehow.  Then I asked him, “Thelonious, do you want to live?”   He said, “Yes, I do.” quite clearly.

Later, the nurse found me and said she went to the internet and looked up this Thelonious Monk that I mentioned to the patient, Thelonious.  She looked up his music and she said she found the exact song he was humming to us.   It was his famous song, Round Midnight. We both looked at each other, surprised and pleased by the patient’s sudden will to live.  My interpretation is that it seems the man was somehow connected to the famous Thelonious Monk, and perhaps Mr. Monk’s spirit helped saved the man’s life when we were unable.  Obviously, they shared a unique first name, but was the connection more than that?

It seems my memory of a name that I decided to mention to the patient, may have started him on a path to better things in life — who knows. I have no idea why it came into my mind, but perhaps it is something we can never understand, except maybe, the spirit of Mr. Monk.

Footnote: Thelonious Monk was an accomplished jazz pianist and composer who had a unique improvisational style and was one of only five jazz musicians to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine.  The others were Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Wynton Marsalis.  Mr. Monk died in 1982

SRCarson Publications