This is a celebration of Dr. Iggy Frome. If you watch the NBC series, New Amsterdam, you already know Iggy. He is “the psych department” at the hospital. So far, that has mostly required him to be empathetic and cuddly, which he is. You hear him say “Oh, I’m sorry” and “No, that’s OK” a lot.
That didn’t happen in the one subplot of the one episode “The Blues” (Season 1, Episode 13) that I am going to describe here. Three lines, all directed at Dr. Lauren Bloom, opened up a new facet of Iggy’s work and changed my assessment of him entirely.
The first zinger was, “I wouldn’t do that.” when Dr. Bloom was about to walk out on the counseling session. The second, in answer to her speculation “So….I’ll get suspended,” was “No, you’ll get fired.” And delivered just right. Nothing cuddly at all there. You’ll have to wait a little for the third zinger, but it will be worth the wait, I promise you.
The Addict
So here’s the deal. Dr. Bloom (Janet Montgomery) has ADHD and is an emergency room physician. She had taken Adderall for her condition for a long time, but now the stresses of her life and work have led to her abusing it. Her colleague and friend, Dr. Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) reports her to the head of the hospital, Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) and Max sets Dr. Bloom up with psychiatrist, Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine).
This is a tough deal for Dr. Bloom. She knows she is abusing Adderall, she knows she is 
making mistakes, but she tries to tough it out and denies all the indications that she is a danger to the hospital. The “appointment” with Iggy is an ambush. Dr. Bloom is called to Iggy’s office to “deal with a VIP.” It turn out that the VIP is her. Max leaves behind a very angry Dr. Bloom,;Iggy sits down behind his desk and starts asking innocuous questions. She can’t leave without getting fired. Iggy’s job is to get her to face the problem, which, after the process I am going to describe, she does. Her last line, as she breaks down in tears is, “I need help.” (37:47) Here is Dr. Bloom in better days.
The Treatment, Phase 1
If making the case against Dr. Bloom, were the job, Iggy could have started off by detailing the evidence against her. He has a lot of evidence, it turns out, in the folder on his desk, but he doesn’t use it. He just asks questions that seem chatty (and are supposed to) but when you have watched this episode several times as I have, you know why he asked them and where he is going to go.
He asks her why she, a New York City girl born and bred, went to Walla Walla, Washington to go to college. She gives a snarky answer because she is angry about the ambush (“It’s insulting”) and doesn’t yet know that she is trapped. [1]
Iggy asks if she abused Adderall. We all know she does. She denies it. Never take an extra dose? Absolutely not. Never put a patient in danger because of overuse. Absolutely not. “If I did that,” says Dr. Bloom, “I would turn in my license.” Iggy has a folder full of evidence that she bas been doing exactly that. “So…what are you waiting for?” he asks.
For me, watching this unfold, the desire to see Iggy play gotcha is overwhelming. She is denying an offense he can prove her to be guilty of. But Iggy isn’t trying to convict her. He is trying to get her to understand that she needs help and that help is available. He can’t do that by producing a lot of evidence.
The Treatment, Phase 2
Iggy asks about her childhood. Her mother was a mess, her sister a victim, and her father a saint. The “mess” her mother was turns out to be a mess that Dr. Bloom had to clean up, beginning at age 7. She protected her sister as long as she could, but abandoned the sister at age 12 so she could go to college. The father’s sainthood turned out to be his business successes and the fact that he always answered the phone when she called him.
That occasions the third of Iggy’s zingers. “You just described him as an emotionally closed-off workaholic who was in complete denial that his personal life was on fire. Who does that sound like?
Iggy means that she is running away, just like her father did, and he wants to know what she is running away from. It turns out that she is running away from the guilt of abandoning her mother and her sister so she could go as far away as she could get.
We see the noose tightening around Dr. Bloom’s neck. Iggy has the evidence and Bloom knows there is no denying it. But she has not yet seen that this is one she can’t tough out. She makes one more try and Iggy helps her—or seems to.
He asks if she thinks she can get her Adderall use under control. She says she can. He asks if she thinks practicing medicine is the best thing for recovery. She says she knows it is. “O.K.” he says, releasing her. “Go show ‘em how it’s done.” [2]
The Treatment, Phase 3
She goes back to the emergency room. but she is disoriented. The image we see of her is out of focus. She sees things in slow motion. She looks at five bays containing people in pain with no real comprehension. Then, without thinking about it, she digs in her pocket for the Adderall. Then she stops.
That is what takes her back to Iggy’s office. She closes the door and leans against it in tears and says, “Ask me again.” He says, “What were you running from?” and this time he gets in. Bloom’s defenses collapse. She has seen for herself that she can’t go on and says, finally, what Iggy needs for her to say, “I need help.”
He responds, “We can do that.”
The whole episode, “The Blues” is OK. It’s fun, especially when you know the characters. [3] But this particular subplot really engaged me. It surprised me. It moved me. And I’ll never look at Iggy the same way again.
[1] I had the same experience with an emergency room physician in Chicago when I demanded that she release me from the hospital. I was pretty uppity about it. She signed a paper saying I had left the hospital against medical advice. I asked her what the airline would do when I presented the paper to them and she said they would not allow me to fly. At that point I realized that she had me completely under her control and I got a great deal more compliant immediately.
[2] They do come back to that moment at the end. Bloom says through her tears, “Were you really clearing me to go back to work? and he replies, “And let a drug addict loose in the ED. God, no. Are you kidding me?”
[3] It’s not a soap opera exactly. It’s a scrub opera.
afraid, agency is what you really need and besides it feels marvelous.
To the extent I do anything at all, in Minnie Haskins picture of reaction to fear, is that I do go out into the darkness. [5]
It does raise the question, however, of what you look for in friends and that is an especially piercing question when the people who might become your friends are your own children.
clearly on nurturance.
It is at that point that you find out how tightly wedded you are to the Wise Man role.
The two hard things about that transformation are that you have to give up a role you were really good at and start practicing a role you are not likely to be as good at, at least at the beginning.
of oversight and provision is gone now [5] and in its place is a friendship.
t isn’t just that his existence is ephemeral, like a mayfly. It is not that it does not last beyond that day; it is that it has no meaning beyond that day. He starts off tomorrow, having learned a great deal from all the yesterdays that he (only) remembers. [2] He finds that terribly discouraging, eventually, but his first response is that it is a great opportunity.
him on his “rounds.” He frightens the insurance salesman who always frightened him; he changes a flat tire for some old ladies; he catches a boy falling out of a tree; he performs the Heimlich maneuver for a man in a restaurant. Those are regular, but episodic.
So the curse wasn’t the arrogant person he was and all the action that inconsequentiality made possible. Had that been the case, the wonderful person he became when he saw the possibilities of inconsequentiality would have been the end of the curse. That’s not how he saw it. The inconsequentiality—the repeating of the same day with the same insipid radio host banter and the same songs and the same “chance” meetings on the street—was itself the curse.
him as the kind of person he really wants to be. He tried seduction and slovenliness and irresponsible work and theft and unconcern and suicide and found them to have consequences for his own sense of himself that he did not like. Now he is trying honest courtship and hygiene and solid professional work and honesty and compassion and he likes that Phil. It doesn’t break the curse (see the argument above on what the curse really was) but it gives him the richest life a person in his situation can have and either he likes it or his heroism in the face of inconsequentiality knows no bounds at all. Jean Paul Sartre would marvel at an existential hero like this Phil Conners.
Santos tries in several ways to use Vinick as a way to get the Vice President he wants. [2] Vinick sees that coming a mile off and refuses to play. In desperation, Santos just tells the truth. “I want you as my Secretary of State. You’re my first choice.”
two men on foreign policy generally and on Kazakhstan in particular, which is a crisis point in the seventh season of the show. Finally, this happens.
Take, for instance, the notion that “a re-tweet is not an endorsement.” [3] I think that is demonstrably false. Let’s consider two notions of what “endorsement” means. The first is truth-value. I “endorse” a story as true by “sharing” [4] it with friends. The second is salience. I “endorse” a story as “meaningful” or “interesting” or “satisfying” or as morbidly confirmatory.
House of Representatives to work the media by calling their opponents ugly names and by alleging damning but unconfirmable [7] statements or actions on their enemy’s part. He brought a gun to the Congressional knife fight.
I happened across this sign recently when I was looking for examples of the idea that when you “know” what something is about, it is hard to notice that other people might think it is about something else. I put it in that post, even though it didn’t fit as well as some others I had found, because I kept laughing at it. It still tickles me.
usic to the man who directs our choir at church. I asked him what he saw there on the page. He told me about the suspension and after it is resolved it winds up in the key of G and all that. I said, “That doesn’t look like Gsus (I pronounced it Jesus) to you?”
