It seems that I have appendicitis. I am keeping quiet about it, even smiling. Why frighten my friends?
Leonid Rogozov, diary, 29 April 1961
You tell clients not to run their own case. Lawyers even have a line for it that has been around for two hundred years. “A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client”. The client laughs and hands over the file.
Then there’s your own issues. Whether to stay at the firm another five years. The partner you stopped trusting some time ago and still share a floor with. The client who pays well and whom you would drop if the money came from somewhere else. What you will be doing at sixty. You handle each and every one of those questions on your own. You read the facts (or do you just guess at them), form a view and act. You do it without any help.
Leonid Rogozov was a surgeon from Leningrad. In 1961 he was twenty-seven and the only doctor among twelve men spending the winter at a new Soviet base in Antarctica. At the end of April, his appendix became inflamed. The sea had frozen, and the ship would not be back for 12 months. Help would have had to come from Mirny, the main Soviet base, about a thousand kilometres away. Unfortunately, a blizzard had grounded all aircraft. He wrote in his diary that he was keeping his problem from the rest of his team. By the next evening he was getting worse. He decided to operate on himself.
He set it up the way he would have any operation. Two men sterilised the instruments. A meteorologist scrubbed in and held the retractors. A driver held a mirror over Rogozov’s stomach so he could see where he was cutting. Rogozov filled syringes himself and told the men what to inject if he passed out. The mirror showed everything backwards, so for part of the operation he worked by feel. It took close to two hours. Within a fortnight he was back at work.
He is the surgeon people remember for operating on himself. He was the only doctor within a thousand kilometres, in a blizzard, but he still had the driver hold the mirror.
You have reasons for keeping quiet, and they are not to be dismissed. The partner down the hall gets a bigger share if you leave. Your friends in the profession know each other and talk. Your clients pay you, to be sure. So you keep quiet, even smiling as you go about your business.
Now read back what you tell every client who wants to run their own case. They know the facts too well. Every document is read for the part that helps them. Confirmation bias is real. The client has decided the answer before they started and is working backwards to it. They miss the weak points because they are the ones who created them. You tell the client all of that. You are right, and you send an invoice for the privilege.
Put your own name at the top of that advice and read it again.
Rogozov kept quiet for a day. Then he told the others, gave four of them a job, and put the mirror in someone else’s hand.
You have been smiling, on your own, for longer than you should.