Years ago, when medical technology was less advanced, abortion was rare and people like Dr. Jack Kevorkian weren’t making ghoulish headlines, living–and especially dying–seemed to be simpler.
Now a new kind of fear intrudes on life and its passages. Will I be forced to decide to “pull the plug” on a loved one? Would I counsel a daughter to seek an abortion? Will I end my days trapped in dementia or festooned with tubes, artificially alive with no way out?
Hospitals rarely offer a spiritual perspective on these kinds of issues, but at Loyola University Medical Center, Myles Sheehan is quietly changing that.
Sheehan, an energetic, bespectacled 40-year-old with a quick guffaw, is a Jesuit priest as well as a physician and ethicist.
With its emphasis on bringing God to places outside of religious settings, the Jesuit order seems to be a perfect fit for Sheehan, who finds no conflict between religion and science and says those who believe there is probably have false images of both.
His unusual career gives him a unique vantage point in helping others navigate the shoals of life in an increasingly complex technological age.
As a doctor at Loyola, Sheehan has the latest in medical technology at his disposal. As an ethicist who organizes the ethics curriculum for medical students, he ponders a range of issues, from deciding when it’s appropriate to prolong life to debating whether it is proper to use tissue from aborted fetuses to help people with neurological diseases.
And as a priest, he must consider the spiritual dimension of both living and dying.
“I don’t let many of my patients know that I’m a priest, since it gets in the way,” Sheehan says, giving an example. “When I’m dealing with younger people and it’s some poor, young guy who has the clap, the last thing he needs to know is that he has a priest examining him. That’s too much of a barrier.
“With my older patients, they often find out and I will talk about it, but I think that I need to be vigilant. Whenever as a physician you reveal something about yourself personally, you have to figure out why you’re doing it. Did you say it to hear somebody say, `You’re wonderful,’ or . . . to help them, to get them to talk about things that they are frightened about?”
As for the interface between religion and science, Sheehan says, “Whatever is truly human is completely appropriate for real religion.”
“Now, there’s a lot of stuff about religion that can be twisted, particularly by religious people, so that it becomes a way to limit people’s human growth,” he adds. “That’s fake. Likewise, science can be seen as something that’s real, whereas religion is hocus-pocus. That’s fake too. It’s fake to view it as a dichotomy.
“And it’s also fake for scientists to think their particular construction of the universe is value-free and is, in fact, reality, because there are a lot of assumptions that they make, a lot of preconceptions they have, and a lack of willingness to understand some of the shaky philosophical bases on which they construct their universes.”
The son of a physician, Sheehan thought about becoming a doctor since he was a child back in Marshfield, Mass.
The idea of being a priest came after medical school at Dartmouth, although the seeds were sown much earlier.
“Everybody has stories about playing priest with your friends and giving out Necco wafers as communion,” Sheehan says. “The idea (of becoming a priest) came back periodically and very strong in college, but it was clear I wanted to be in medical school.”
He talked to the Jesuits’ vocation director in New England, who advised him to continue with his medical training, because if he were meant to be a priest he would “come this way again.”
“In medical school I thought about getting married, although in retrospect I was way too immature,” Sheehan says. “By the time I was doing my residency in internal medicine, I thought the idea of being a priest was pretty much out of my head.
“Then it just came back incredibly strong. . . . I don’t hear voices, I’m not psychotic, but I came as close as one can to feeling a voice: `I love you and I want you to be my priest. I want you to give the Jesuits a try.’ “
Sheehan entered the Jesuit order after completing his residency and, in addition to further medical training, earned master’s degrees in philosophy and theology.
He settled on the field of geriatrics because he enjoyed caring for older patients.
He explains that he “felt proudest of the kind of clinical situation that involved restoring somebody to independence or looking and finding a surprise in someone that everyone else said was demented. And I’d say, `They’re not demented. It’s the medications they’re taking.’ Being able to `fix’ somebody that way is gratifying. . . .
“With older people I feel I’m pretty good at saying enough is enough and helping people die as good a death as is possible without endless tubes and intensive-care units.”
At a lunchtime talk on aging sponsored by a women’s health committee at Loyola, Sheehan tells his audience that he is a board-certified geriatrician and that he “knows about aging from (being a son) and being a doctor. “Old age isn’t a disease,” Sheehan says. “There’s no reason you’re going to be demented, fall apart, wet your pants, though those things do happen. We have some control over the aging process.”
He suggests that the nursing staff keep the TVs off in the rooms of older patients during the day because it can add to their confusion.
“They watch soap operas about murder and all kinds of sex. And I’m not being a prude because I’m a priest, but a patient once said to me, `I know you. You were just with that nurse.’ “
After the talk, a young woman stops Sheehan and tells him the most wonderful thing he did was to “take the mystery out of aging.” Out of Sheehan’s earshot, someone else characterizes his talk, which is not laden with typical medical jargon, as standup comedy.
Sheehan says his speeches outside the Loyola family are more sober, but he clearly likes to have fun.
He’s an avid cook (Italian dishes are his specialty) and brews beer in the cellar of the Loyola-owned Oak Park home he shares with three other Jesuit priests. Although he has little time to devote to television, he admits an affection for “Beavis and Butt-head” because it “makes me laugh and be silly.”
Students call him by his first name and say he’s not averse to hanging out with them in bars occasionally. Of course, he also says mass for them in the hospital chapel on Sunday afternoon.
“He has a very good balance in his life,” says Bill Watson, a second-year Loyola medical student. “I was kind of surprised that a priest knows how to have a good time. Medicine is very important to him but he also knows what else is important. He knows what his beliefs are, and he uses his education in theology to influence medicine. It’s a very fresh and different view of medicine. He’s very much a role model.”
Fourth-year student Gaile Sabaliauskas adds: “A lot of people say they believe that body, mind and spirit are connected. He actually lives it.”
Sheehan spends the largest chunk of his time on medical education, both teaching and planning courses, an area he got involved with during a fellowship in geriatrics at Harvard University before coming to Loyola in 1995.
He also supervises residents in clinics at Hines Hospital, a facility for veterans, and maintains a private practice.
Sheehan says ethical dilemmas in medicine often are the result of poor communication and “the inability to understand alternative positions.”
“Sometimes it’s because somebody is on a high horse and is being a jerk and won’t talk,” he explains. “Sometimes it’s just that people have ideas that are difficult to deal with. If the parents of a brain-dead child are trying to stop you from removing the respirator, that isn’t an ethical dilemma. It’s a (matter of) how does one deal with an overwhelming tragedy and how does one face the pain of those parents.
“And how does one do what has to be done without further brutalizing two people who already have lost their whole world?
“That’s the ethical issue that’s of interest: What does it mean for us to be human? What are we doing by our actions? And who are we becoming by them?”
