The Boston Celtics have produced dozens of sports heroes. Twenty-four of them, including Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Larry Bird, and Paul Pierce, have had their numbers retired and displayed on a banner in the Boston Garden.
In 1997, the Celtic organization established The Heroes Among Us program, an initiative to honor heroes outside the sports world, individuals who have made an overwhelming impact on the lives of others. At each home game, the Celtics and their fans salute the exemplary efforts of these citizens during a special in-game presentation on the legendary parquet floor. On May 10, 2017, during a playoff game, that award was bestowed to Dr. James O’Connell, MD.
Jim O’Connell is a fascinating man, a brilliant man, the kind of person who would have excelled at just about anything he set his mind to. He came of age in the '60s, which probably had a lot to do with his idealism and adventurous spirit.
Jim grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Newport, Rhode Island. After high school, he attended Notre Dame where he earned a degree in philosophy. He continued his study of philosophy for two years at Cambridge University. He quit the field soon after, claiming that he did not have a mind for philosophy. “What he did have was a mind for ideas connected to action,” wrote Tracy Kidder in his book, “Rough Sleepers.”
Jim traveled to Hawaii where he taught literature and coached high school basketball for two years in Honolulu. “I left to keep looking,” he told Kidder. He drifted back to Newport and tended bar with an old college friend. Then the two of them pooled their money together and purchased an old dairy barn in a remote area in northern Vermont, turning it into a dwelling. During this period, Jim entertained the idea of becoming a New England country lawyer. However, at the age of 30, after witnessing a serious motorcycle accident, Jim set his mind on a career in medicine. He would be a country doctor in Vermont making house calls. He applied to the University of Vermont’s medical school but was turned down and told that he was too old and that he lacked the endurance required for medical training. So Jim settled for the Harvard Medical School. During his four years at Harvard, he paid his way by tending bar on the side.
We all experience turning points in our lives. We’re heading in one direction pursuing a specific goal when something happens that takes us in an entirely different direction. For Jim O’Connell, that turning point occurred in his third and final year of residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He won a prestigious oncology fellowship at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to begin in the fall of 1985. It’s safe to say that had he continued in that direction, Jim O’Connell might well have become a wealthy oncologist on the night of May 10, 2017, comfortably watching the Celtics playoff game in one of the plush seats in the Boston Garden Society whose members enjoy both in-seat food and beverage service and exclusive access to an upscale dining experience in the 1928 Club.
His boss, Dr. John Potts, Mass General’s chief of medicine, persuaded Jim to do something else for a year, promising him that his oncology fellowship would still be available when he finished. That something was a pilot healthcare project for the homeless that was in the works, which needed a full-time doctor. Jim was reluctant. At 37, he was looking forward to a career in mainstream medicine. But he agreed, thinking, it’s only a year, then I’ll go on with my life.
I have read books and articles and watched YouTube videos about Dr. James O’Connell. But nowhere have I read or heard any explanation from Dr. Potts as to why he selected Jim O’Connell as the first doctor of the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. But it was clearly an informed decision. Being aware of Jim’s background and knowing he was a part-time bartender who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Potts must have known that this was the sort of man not likely to be uncomfortable around the poorest of the poor.
Jim was instructed to go to the Pine Street Inn homeless shelter and report to the nurses' clinic. He wrongly assumed that the nurses who ran the clinic would be happy to see him. Tracy Kidder describes the encounter in “Rough Sleepers:”
“When Jim arrived, the clinic hadn’t yet opened for patients, but half a dozen nurses were already inside, awaiting his arrival. In the cramped space near the clinic’s front desk, metal chairs had been arranged in a circle, with one chair in the middle, meant for him. In his memory, he sat there encircled by nurses. Their faces were stern. They said they weren’t interested in investing their time in training a doctor who planned to leave in a year. And if that was what he planned to do—to play doctor to a bunch of homeless men, earn their trust, have them learn to rely on him, and then desert them—it would be better if he didn’t come at all. He was probably looking for an interesting experience, they said. He probably thought he was doing a good deed.
“They were warning him, in a way that made him feel accused of having committed that crime already—as he had, inwardly. He felt shocked, too shocked to feel offended.”
When they were finished, one of the nurses, Barbara McInnis, took Jim’s arm and led him out to the lobby. She told Jim that he should not take the hostility of the nurses to heart. Nurses had created the clinic, she explained, and many of them would be happy never to have a doctor on the premises. “I really think we want doctors,” she told him. “But you’ve been trained all wrong…You have to let us retrain you. If you come in with your doctor questions, you won’t learn anything. You have to learn to listen to these patients.”
Jim’s retraining began with feet soaking. “Come on in now,” said Barbara. “You’re going to soak feet. I’ll show you how.”
Jim walked in and observed homeless men along the walls, their feet in plastic buckets. Jim recognized many of them. “Over the past three years,” Kidder writes, “he’d seen them in the Mass General emergency room, sullen, angry, snarling, resisting all treatment. Here they seemed so docile they might have been drugged, via foot soaking.” Barbara showed Jim the technique, adding that he was to address patients by their surname—Mr. So-and-So.
For the first month, Jim did little more than soak feet. One of the regulars was Mr. Carr, whom Jim knew from the Mass General emergency room. The police had brought him there numerous times. He was classified as a paranoid schizophrenic.
One evening, as Jim knelt on the floor filling the tubs, he heard Mr. Carr say, “Hey, I thought you were s’posed to be a doctor.” He was looking down at Jim with the suggestion of a smile around his lips and amusement in his eyes.
In the last month no one here had called Jim “doctor.” Yes! he said, looking up at Mr. Carr. Yes, he was indeed a doctor!
“So what the hell you doin’ soakin’ feet?”
Jim glanced around and saw Barbara and other nurses nearby obviously eavesdropping. He looked back up at Mr. Carr. “You know what? I do whatever the nurses tell me.”
Mr. Carr nodded. “Smart man. That’s what I do.”
About a week later, the old man put his feet in the buckets and said to Jim, “Hey, Doc. Can you give me something to help me sleep?” He never slept more than an hour, he said. Within about a month, Jim had Mr. Carr taking a variety of medicines for his many ailments. “Foot soaking in a homeless shelter—the biblical connotations were obvious. But for Jim, what counted most were the practical lessons, the way this simple therapy reversed the usual order—placing the doctor at the feet of the people he was trying to serve. As a doctor in training, he’d spent most of his time telling patients what he thought, saying, ‘We need to get that blood pressure down,’ or ‘I’m concerned about the results of your kidney tests.’ This new approach was entirely different, and he began to realize, it was much more effective clinically, at least with homeless people. And foot soaking was the perfect way to begin.”
As you’ve probably surmised by now, Jim O’Connell never followed through with that prestigious oncology fellowship. The man who once imagined himself as a country doctor making house calls ended up making nightly “street rounds” from dusk until dawn, riding around in an outreach van meeting the needs of a marginalized group facing medical problems often exacerbated by mental illness and substance abuse.
“When I started doing this job, there was no real professional career path to take care of homeless people and stay part of the academic community that I cherish,” O’Connell recalled to Harvard Magazine. “I believe that what we’re doing is at the core of medicine and who we are as healers and providers.”
To the homeless people in Boston, he’s more than a healer and provider.
Dr. Jim is a friend.
Beautiful. Brought tears to my eyes.