Response is the tenacity of health care communications

This chapter's metaphors were a bit tougher to grasp than in Arnett et al.'s previous topics, but the recurrence of "responsiveness" as the "final freedom" in health care communications really spoke to my personal experience both viewing and acting in the communicative space between one person and a disadvantaged Other. For clarity, I use "disadvantaged" as a catch-all term for a variety of circumstances, including disease, illness, death of a loved one, and other such conditions that I fall under the umbrella of health care communications, in which responsiveness serves the good of promoting care for the Other during aforementioned moments of "the tragic, and the inevitable" (191). What's particularly effective about the notion of response, that which "meets the call of the Other, even when the call is unwanted," is that it conjures images of the heroes in our everyday lives who exhibit care even in the most desolate moments of "being left to swim with no dry land in sight" (192; 195). These heroes, who answer a call to pragmatism that can elevate us from emotional turmoil, can be caretakers or family members, doctors or mere spectators--anyone with words of comfort and wisdom to share, or the adaptive intelligence to make choices for the good of the patient when all hope seems lost.

In other cases, these champions of pragmatism can be the patients themselves. (I note a connection back to our communication ethics formula, as described during my business and professional ethics presentation.) I would share the story of Greg Miller, a video game journalist who serves as a peer to me and an inspiration to my own work. A couple years back, Greg was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma--essentially, cancer of the lymph node tissue. Understandably, this diagnosis was a setback to Greg's continued career--as a senior editor with IGN, one of the world's biggest websites, his daily work comprised a dizzying array of writing, editing, and critiquing responsibilities that (and I speak from personal experience) are exhausting enough without the looming threat of cancer. In this diagnosis, and in months of somewhat dejected tweets and blog posts that followed, I note what Arnett et al. describe as the "inevitable," "when life seems to offer no way out of a bad moment" (195).

In this space of hopelessness, Greg persevered to the surprise of his colleagues, friends, and onlookers like myself. He reinvented the way IGN does editorial content--placing a heavy emphasis on original video programming, conversational journalism, and YouTube integration--and subsequently pushed the site's audience into the stratosphere while setting a new bar for all similar outlets, including my own, to aspire to. For Greg, the pragmatic decision to use work as an escape from dreary tidings of his health was a communicative response to the employees, friends, and family members who surrounded him. In this final freedom, Greg took communicative action that protected and promoted both his health and the health of fellow employees and, more broadly, all video game writers. His example is not only a sterling depiction of how engagement with courage can turn the tides on a diagnosis, he closely connects this chapter with real-life notions of heroism in the face of death or defeat.