Timothy P. Flanigan, M.D. ’16Hon., ’18G — The humanities and health crises

Timothy P. Flanigan, M.D. '16Hon., '18G, the former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School, presented this year's Fiondella Lecture. He shared stories from the front lines of the HIV, Ebola, and COVID health crises, describing how the humanities helped him through these challenging experiences.

In 2016, Flanigan received an honorary degree from Providence College for his efforts in public health and service to the Diocese of Providence. In 2018, he completed a graduate degree in theology from PC, which he started while studying to become a deacon.

The Fiondella Lecture was made possible by the generosity of Robert W. Fiondella '64, '16Hon. and Carolyn Fiondella.

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Creators & Guests

Producer

Chris Judge

Multimedia and Live Event Producer

What is Providence College Podcast?

The Providence College Podcast features interviews with interesting members of the Friar Family. These in-depth conversations with PC students, Dominicans, faculty, staff, and alumni provide a rich look into the lives of noteworthy Friars. Occasionally we will also bring you on-campus lectures and presentations. Go Friars!

00;00;00;20 - 00;00;21;25
Chris Judge
Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast. This week we wanted to feature a recent lecture on campus given by Dr. Timothy Flanagan, established by Robert Philo, a class of 1964. The annual Fee and Dollar Lecture brings accomplished leaders to campus to discuss themes or topics that underscore the importance of a foundation in the humanities to the study of business and other disciplines.

00;00;22;14 - 00;00;38;17
Chris Judge
Dr. Flanagan received an honorary degree in 2016 from PCI and finished a graduate degree here at PC and Theology in 2018. Here's Dr. Flanagan discussing how the humanities helped him to serve the front lines on the AIDS, Ebola and COVID crises.

00;00;39;07 - 00;01;09;10
Timothy Flanigan
I want to start off and ask Saint John Paul, the second Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Blessed Pierre Giorgio, Father Damien of Molokai, Bob Keren. Charlie Saint Terrace. G.K. Chesterton. C.S. Lewis. J.R.R. Tolkien. Please pray for us. They are all good friends. And you probably know most of them, but probably not all of them. So thanks to Professor Hayne and Keating for generously leading the Humanities program.

00;01;09;20 - 00;01;38;26
Timothy Flanigan
Thanks for Providence College for my degree in your MTS Master's Theological Studies. It's a huge help to us deacons and thanks to the fees below Vendela Lectureship Committee and for their family's generosity for this lectureship. And thanks to you all for coming. I when I came back well, let's see, when I finished my two months in Liberia, I thought I would just come home and go to a beach cottage somewhere.

00;01;39;06 - 00;01;58;00
Timothy Flanigan
And my wife called me up and I said, Oh, don't worry, Lou, but it's no big deal. And then all of my sisters and brothers called me up and said, You're not coming home after you've done that because of the scare of Ebola. So I ended up in Rome and I thought, goodness gracious, we should go to the North American College.

00;01;58;01 - 00;02;26;23
Timothy Flanigan
Everyone would like to hear about the Ebola crisis in our time there. Great stories, slides. So we went to lunch and we came back. There were four people in the audience, so it gave me a little bit of a it was a little humbling lesson. That one's perspective is not necessarily everybody's perspective. Anyway, so I'm a physician and I've had the great pleasure of serving on the front lines of the HIV and AIDS epidemic literally for 30 years.

00;02;27;15 - 00;02;48;04
Timothy Flanigan
And then during the Ebola epidemic and during the COVID epidemic. So I want to share a few stories and reflections about that. But first, I want to give you just a few tidbits about who I am. So I graduated from Portsmouth Abbey School quite a while ago, and I went to Dartmouth College, and I was a history major.

00;02;48;21 - 00;03;18;21
Timothy Flanigan
I did my senior thesis on Tom ism, the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the 20th century. A great title, which is a key part of life, but not actually very academic, because my primary source was G.K. Chesterton's the Dumb Ox. I highly recommend it. So I took pre-med courses. I worked in a hospital up in Newfoundland for a few months and it was much more compelling than my time working in a bank.

00;03;19;02 - 00;03;53;29
Timothy Flanigan
And so off I went to Cornell Medical School. I took care of my first patient with AIDS as a fourth year medical student in 1983 and New York at that time, we were right across the street from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and there clinics were full, predominantly of young men who were suffering this terrible illness. During my first day of internship at Penn, I met my wife Luba, and everybody says, Well, you must have got into infectious diseases because you love to look at microbes.

00;03;54;02 - 00;04;12;26
Timothy Flanigan
Nothing more fun. But actually, my wife said at that time, we're going out. She said, Well, I'm going to do a fellowship. And I realized, okay, she's doing a fellowship. I got to do a fellowship because things are going pretty well. We had to stay on track together. And my way of thinking. And so I did my fellowship in infectious diseases and it worked out great.

00;04;13;18 - 00;04;38;17
Timothy Flanigan
It just goes to show that your path is often chosen for you. Then we came to Brown in 1991, and here we are 32 years later with five kids and one grandchild. Very, very, very happy. Ten years ago, I was ordained a permanent deacon at here in the diocese, and I serve at Saint Teresa and Saint Christopher's Church with Father Cermak.

00;04;38;17 - 00;05;03;28
Timothy Flanigan
He's my pastor, my boss, and I really enjoy it. I'm not young any more. Shocking. I'm 65. I just cut down to 50% in my infectious disease work, and I'm doing more and more in the diaconate and I love it. That is the topic of another lecture. So professionally, I'm an AIDS doctor, so I was an intern in Philadelphia.

00;05;04;08 - 00;05;28;00
Timothy Flanigan
My second night on call, a young man had flown in from San Francisco, gone home, and he was clearly very ill and his family brought him to get admitted to the emergency room. We called it then the emergency room, the emergency department. Now, my senior resident said, Tim, I'm happy to take care of this patient by my own if you want.

00;05;28;00 - 00;05;45;28
Timothy Flanigan
I said, Nope. I went to medical school in New York and I had already taken care of a few patients with HIV. So I said, No, I definitely will take care of them. And he ended up spending six weeks in the hospital. I'll call him Mike for the sake of the story. He was a young gay man who had left home.

00;05;45;28 - 00;06;11;18
Timothy Flanigan
He came from an Italian family, gone to San Francisco, and then after a few years, he ended up getting sick. Weight loss, cough, fever, shortness of breath, terrible, terrible skin rashes. And finally, he wasn't able to take care of himself. He was just too weak. And he said, I just have to go home, which he did, and then came into the hospital.

00;06;12;06 - 00;06;34;09
Timothy Flanigan
Every day I had to draw his blood. Sounds crazy. Today. Today, professional phlebotomist. Thank goodness. Draw your blood. But in those days, we did it. And after six weeks, he didn't have many veins left. It was really, really tough. I. I had to cause him pain. Not just his illness was painful, but I had to cause him that pain every day.

00;06;35;06 - 00;07;05;02
Timothy Flanigan
I can't tell you how kind he and his mother was to me. I was astounded. Our treatments in those days were terrible. We had no treatment for the HIV virus In our treatment for the complicating infections was pretty doggone poor. His rosary was at his bedside table. His mom would come in every single day, sit there and chat, make small talk, just visit, spend all that time with him.

00;07;06;21 - 00;07;38;29
Timothy Flanigan
The suffering that he endured, and yet the love that they showed for each other and the kindness to me and to others was absolutely heroic and incredible to see. He endured the pain and suffering, but he did it with a heroism that absolutely astounded me. We talked a little bit about prayer. He definitely prayed. We talked a little bit about faith.

00;07;38;29 - 00;08;07;29
Timothy Flanigan
And his faith wasn't abstract. It was totally, totally real. Pain and suffering is so, so real. And one of the most amazing feats of modern medicine is that we actually have been able to eliminate the pain and suffering associated with HIV and AIDS. Our medicines for HIV stopped the virus in its track, and folks can have their health.

00;08;08;23 - 00;08;43;23
Timothy Flanigan
I promise you 100% restored and can live an amazing, fully active, wonderful life. So one man says, Well, can't we do this with all pain and suffering? And Americans have a can do attitude. You know, we think about pain and suffering sometimes with an attitude of let's just fix it. Can't we prevent it? Can we cure it? Maybe it can be eliminated like it actually was.

00;08;44;02 - 00;09;17;02
Timothy Flanigan
Is with HIV and AIDS for those who can take their medications when it happens, whose fault is it? How did this happen? Why didn't they catch it earlier? Who let this occur? Maybe it's due to injustices, social constructs. Certainly. Sometimes it is. Well, can we fix it? Can we prevent that from happening? I was on a long flight coming back from India with the fellow, and we started chatting about it.

00;09;18;03 - 00;09;49;13
Timothy Flanigan
And he commented that we Americans think that suffering is an accident or an aberration in our lives, that it needs to be fixed or prevented. He said, Oh, no, we Indians, in contrast to you Americans, we believe that suffering and pain is part of our life. It just is. It's like the rain. It cannot be avoided. We have to help each other through it.

00;09;49;23 - 00;10;16;23
Timothy Flanigan
We have to try and lighten the load. But it's part of life. It has to be endured, endured with love, with help and friendship, but just endured. A good friend of mine, Donna, took off from work for four months to take care of her 93 year old mother when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and she was too old for chemotherapy.

00;10;17;00 - 00;10;48;08
Timothy Flanigan
Obviously a really good decision. One afternoon, Don and her sister were taking her to the bathroom. She was just too weak. They would walker one on each arm to the bathroom, sit her on down. And then when she was done, they literally had to, you know, cleaner up, wipe or bum and walk around back. They were walking her back and she looked up at them and she said, you know, she says, I have the most wonderful two daughters in the entire world.

00;10;48;22 - 00;11;32;21
Timothy Flanigan
And she had tears in Iraq. She was a stern Italian matriarch, Donna said. In her entire life, she had never, ever said anything like that. How is it that someone in their pain, their suffering and their terrible need could express their greatest love, which is part of the greatest joy that we have in our life? How is it that you can mix together the pain and the suffering, but the joy that's given to us mixed with grace?

00;11;33;19 - 00;11;58;26
Timothy Flanigan
Donna said, Oh, and by the way, the last two months of her life were filled with some of the greatest laughter that we've ever shared together as a family. To me, this is a mystery, and I don't think we can unpack it. It's a gift. It's a gift given to us. Grace is present. It is just there. And we're asked to be present in the midst of it.

00;11;59;29 - 00;12;35;16
Timothy Flanigan
Now, many who hear this will understand deeply rebel know the pain and suffering is not okay. I'm not going to endure it. It is not okay. But the way in which pain and suffering, joy, laughter and grace coexist can be mixed together. Actually, you might say this is not going to be okay, but it's the same way when you look at the back of a tapestry where it's jumbled and mixed up does not look okay.

00;12;35;23 - 00;13;08;21
Timothy Flanigan
It's only when you see it from the front that you go, Hmm, Somehow this is all together. C.S. Lewis in his introduction to the problem of pain, which is when he famously talks about how is it that pain can exist? Greatest challenge to a loving God. In his introduction, he says, I have little to offer my readers, except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge.

00;13;09;27 - 00;13;42;02
Timothy Flanigan
A little human sympathy, much more than courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. I stand in awe of the pain and the suffering of so many of my patients with HIV and AIDS. Eyewitness their heroic courage and their love and was able to be at their bedside. Jesus never asked us to carry our cross alone.

00;13;42;22 - 00;14;25;04
Timothy Flanigan
He's always there with us to help us, whether we know it or not. And our suffering is never for not no matter how much we wish to avoid suffering. It's just with us, like the air that we breathe. Let's skip forward to Ebola, to Liberia. So 2013 is when the Ebola epidemic struck. I had traveled to West Africa and to Ghana because I had a good colleague of mine, Dr. Okwara, graduated from the University of Ghana, and he and I had gone over and done some work with HIV and AIDS, how to provide care better in a resource, poor setting and so forth.

00;14;25;24 - 00;15;02;03
Timothy Flanigan
So when the Ebola outbreak hit the news in 2013, I followed it with intense interest. And then the fragile medical system there in Liberia totally collapsed in July, and patients literally could not get into the Ebola treatment units. And they were dying outside the doors on the street. Now, I thought I got to try and help some way, but I'm no good in an earthquake or in a war zone because I'm not an emergency medicine physician.

00;15;02;11 - 00;15;29;14
Timothy Flanigan
So if you have a terrible car accident, you know, turn to the EMTs, don't turn to Tim Flanigan. But I do understand a lot about infectious diseases. How does it spread? How do you how can you protect yourself? How can you really halt the transmission? I also had lived through those first years of the HIV epidemic when there was terrible fear, when there was so much that we did not know.

00;15;30;22 - 00;16;02;23
Timothy Flanigan
So I thought, how might they be able to help? Well, God bless my wife, Luba. I sort of was talking to her and I thought, you know, what do you think? I think maybe I should try and go. Said, Yeah, why don't you try and do that? Why don't you see what gets turned up? And then first thing she said was, Hey, I'll tell you, I'll take care of everything here on the home front, which was no small deal because our kids were at that time, about seven years old, up to about 18.

00;16;03;18 - 00;16;31;14
Timothy Flanigan
So during the chaos of that summer, it was really hard to find an opportunity for volunteer to go to Liberia. But I was given the name of a wonderful nun, Sister Barbara. She's part of the FMC. Anybody know what the FB mama Put your hands up and I thank you. The Franciscans, the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. And they have a house right around the corner from here on Fruit Hill.

00;16;31;24 - 00;16;57;19
Timothy Flanigan
They're really remarkable group of individuals, by and large. Most of their sisters are international. They're not American. So Sister Barbara lived in Liberia for 37 years, then, including being there through the civil war. And what a blessing she was during that crisis. She was really quite something. I sent her my CV. We talked by phone. She said, you know, come along.

00;16;57;19 - 00;17;20;29
Timothy Flanigan
You might be able to be of some use. And then she said, Oh, I took your CV and I ran it by the bishop. And he said, Yup, you've got my permission to invite him to come and help. I thought, That's pretty good. And then I learned the first lesson, which is, if you're going to go somewhere to help in a true crisis, don't go thinking that you're going to fix it.

00;17;21;20 - 00;17;56;09
Timothy Flanigan
Instead, go and just see what you can do to help and do whatever it is that they want you to do with a smile and jump right in. I ended up working for two months with Sister Barbara's team to help the Catholic medical clinics stay open safely and see patients. They saw the desperately poor throughout Monrovia. We also went to work to try and reopen St Joseph's Catholic Hospital, which was shut down when the Ebola pandemic swept through.

00;17;57;00 - 00;18;16;04
Timothy Flanigan
The head of the hospital, his brother Patrick, he was from the Cameroons. He spoke French and he was a nurse. A woman came desperately ill from Sierra Leone. First she went to JFK Hospital. Oh, no, we're not going to admit you. You might have Ebola. Then she went to the ELWA hospital. Oh, no. We don't have room right now.

00;18;16;04 - 00;18;43;05
Timothy Flanigan
We cannot met you. Finally, she came to St Joseph's Catholic Hospital. He spoke French. He was able to talk to her brother. Said okay, I can take care of you. Two days later, she died of Ebola. 15 members of the hospital staff became infected. Eight of whom died. It was really awful and terrible. The suffering was was was terrible.

00;18;43;06 - 00;19;04;25
Timothy Flanigan
I remember when we were trying to figure out what how to bring the hospital back to life. Said, Yeah, who's in charge of the warehouse where everything is stored? Mm. My brother George was in charge, but he died in his room with an I.V. bag hanging up on the wall with nobody able to go in and see him alone.

00;19;05;12 - 00;19;29;03
Timothy Flanigan
Really, really, really tough. So my job was to work with Sister Barbara to try and keep the clinics open and try and reopen the hospital. Understandably realistic for realistic reasons. Fear was our number one impediment. What do you have to fight? Fear. Knowledge of the virus. How it's spread and what you can do to stop it. PPE. Personal protective equipment.

00;19;29;03 - 00;20;09;07
Timothy Flanigan
We've all heard that before. And finally, camaraderie. Camaraderie. Doing it together. Bringing the hospital staff together so we could meet and talk about Ebola. We could practice using PPE safely. And we could do it together. Was incredibly healing in Liberia. Every single meeting such as this one would start with a hymn and with a prayer. We also started it with a story from one of the staff talking about their own experience having become infected with Ebola and having recovered.

00;20;09;19 - 00;20;41;07
Timothy Flanigan
And that was a truly amazing. So the most common three words that Jesus spoke in the gospel was be not afraid. It's how John Paul, the second, started his pontificate. God gives each of us a heart. We are all asked to be courageous, but in very different ways. And the flip side is we all have different fears. Before we started, Sister Barbara said, Tim, I know you, you're very enthusiastic.

00;20;41;10 - 00;21;06;02
Timothy Flanigan
You're going to want everybody to go out after we've done our training, do X, Y and Z. She said about a third of the staff is not going to go. They're going to stay. Why? Because for them, their fear is paralyzing and you have to respect it. Got it? I said, okay, but not cross at you. But she was totally right.

00;21;06;03 - 00;21;29;11
Timothy Flanigan
We are all different. We all have different types of courage and different types of fear. God wants each of us to be the best version of ourself. We need to get to know our hearts and what it is that we are supposed to do. For me, I was an infectious disease doctor. I could wrap my head around a virus and how it spread and what we could do.

00;21;29;23 - 00;21;51;06
Timothy Flanigan
It was tailor made for what I could do. One day I was talking to my Liberian driver and I said, Boy, I'd much rather face Ebola than be here during the Liberian Civil War. And face a 14 year old strung out on drugs with a machine gun, which was very often the case. He chuckled, shook his head, said, Oh, no, no, no, no.

00;21;51;12 - 00;22;18;06
Timothy Flanigan
I'd much rather face a 14 year old with a machine gun, which he had, and it showed me how different we all are. Personally, I think it takes as much courage somedays for Father Edmund, our chaplain at Brown, to walk across the green at Brown in his white Dominican robes, knowing that some of the students look at him with scorn, contempt or outright hatred.

00;22;18;23 - 00;22;47;27
Timothy Flanigan
That is a big deal. Very grateful for it. So God never out does is to be never is outdone in generosity. And for me, my time in Liberia was one of the most rewarding times that I've had professionally. While I was there, the tide turned predominantly because the community learned to stop the spread of Ebola. And I came on back and rejoined our group as an infectious disease doctor.

00;22;48;21 - 00;23;12;21
Timothy Flanigan
Now, let's go to February 2020 time we all know so well. So I happened to be on call at the Miriam Hospital as of Friday night and an assistant principal returned from taking students over to Europe from Saint Raman High School right around the corner. And he was interviewed for an article in the Wall Street Journal. And he's spoken about it and he's become a friend of mine.

00;23;12;27 - 00;23;35;12
Timothy Flanigan
Marc Thibaut So I can give you his name. He's a really wonderful, wonderful person. He's the first person in Rhode Island who came down with COVID 19 on Thursday when he was ill. He said, Well, I better be tested. And he went to Kent and the Department of Health said, Oh, no, I'm sorry, you can only be tested if you were in the Wuhan area of China.

00;23;35;20 - 00;23;57;03
Timothy Flanigan
Said, But wait a second. I was over in Europe and our tour guide was sick. And I know there's COVID over there. Well, the next day they allowed it to be tested and unfortunately he had become infected and was sick and was admitted to the hospital. He was intubated in the ICU and was very ill, but recovered 100%.

00;23;58;00 - 00;24;22;07
Timothy Flanigan
Who is it that took care of him day by day during that time period? And truly, I think with our care made all the difference. It was not me. It was the nurses. So I often say heaven is going to be full of nurses and also volunteer coaches. And I have well, I only know that because I've got four boys.

00;24;22;13 - 00;24;46;04
Timothy Flanigan
So God bless the volunteer coaches, the coaches. So but I really do mean it. It's quite remarkable. So many of the doctors, my colleagues were afraid to go into the hospital, those that did what sometimes take care of their patients using the telephone or go in for very short periods of time. It was the nurses who made sure their IVs were working.

00;24;46;10 - 00;25;17;17
Timothy Flanigan
Adjusted their oxygen, clean them up, took care of them, and literally did save their life. It was the nurses who hooked them up with them are literally were able to work with face time so they could speak with their family, so they could talk together, pray together, and often say goodbye together. You know, often I thought their guardian angels must have been so, so proud of them.

00;25;18;13 - 00;25;52;24
Timothy Flanigan
And you think for them, they all went home, They all were scared and they did it because their patients needed it. And if they weren't going to do it, nobody else would. It became clear in the first few days that none of us could fight this pandemic alone. It was only through the encouragement of each other, helping each other day in and day out, an extra smile, bringing in extra munchkins in the morning that you could get through these challenges.

00;25;53;17 - 00;26;19;18
Timothy Flanigan
Medicine, like so many other things, is a team sport, and it's just as important to be helpful and kind to each other as it is to be kind to your patients. So in the midst of my adventures, what's helped me. There are days you get discouraged, days you get down. And of course, Luba, my kids, my family, my friends, a pint of Guinness.

00;26;19;18 - 00;26;48;28
Timothy Flanigan
Now it again makes all the difference. But I also count as friends. Puddle Glum from the Narnia series Mary and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings, George McDonald and Father Brown. Heather King, Rumer Garden and Madeleine L'Engle. C.S. Lewis. In the movie, Shadowlands says, We read so that we are not alone. You'll meet these friends in the humanities.

00;26;48;28 - 00;26;54;00
Timothy Flanigan
You're not going to meet them in the medical texts, but they'll help you get through the day.

00;26;57;14 - 00;27;12;10
Chris Judge
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