Nurse Researcher, Dr. Chris Patty

Michelle: I am so excited to share with you the interview of Dr. Chris Patty today. Chris is such an interesting gentleman. He is really living his best life as a nurse. He's had a lot of roles throughout his 37-year career, but in his current role, I really wanted to know a lot more. He's a nurse researcher, and that really piqued my interest. And I think the best thing that I heard in this interview is that he said research is about discovery and every nurse can discover. He is brilliant, I knew he would be. And the bonus is he's also my brother. At the end, we do this five-minute snippet where we just ask him some rapid-fire questions and we get to know a little bit more about him as just a regular guy. Here's Dr. Chris Patty.
Michelle: You're listening to the Conversing Nurse podcast. I'm Michelle, your host. And this is where together, we explore the nursing profession, one conversation at a time.
Michelle: So welcome.
Chris: Thank you. Welcome.
Michelle: It's a pleasure to talk to you today, as always. And today we're going to talk about a lot of things, one of them being research because that's what this is about. But I just wanted you to briefly talk about how you became a nurse, how that came about.
Chris: Yeah, well, I think that I came from a family where mom left nursing school, essentially to get married and have me in 1961. I don't know that that was a strong influence in my life early on. In my early teens, I helped take care of my grandfather and was taught at about age 14-15, how to irrigate a Foley catheter and get people up off the floor. And that may have had something to do with it. I kind of took a gap year between high school and college, and in that year, I was looking for something to do, even a way to make money, maybe. And I happened upon an ad in the local newspaper for a little trade college here in Visalia, and it was advertising a program about surgical technologists. And of course, the ad, as ads do, made it seem much more glamorous than it really was. But I called them, I went down, interviewed. I think the program cost two $400. It was a nine month program and I completed it and went to work in the operating room as a surgical technologist, or they also called it operating room technician, scrub in, hold, retractors, suction, pass instruments, that kind of thing. And that's where I met the people that I would surround myself with to this day. Doctors, nurses, et cetera. This was an operating room back in1981, actually, when I came to the operating room, where many operating rooms were still all RN staff. In the bigger cities, certainly, but in this small city, as staff of nurses for the circulating role, of technicians for the scrubbed role, and I, as the scrubbed person was standing there, feet hurting, back hurting. This is at 20 years old. And I look across the room, and there's a guy sitting down reading Mad magazine, making three times what I was making. And I went and talked to him. I said, how do you get that job? He goes, well, you got to become a registered nurse. How do you do that? Well, you got to go over to College of Sequoias, and you got to go talk to Dr. Merviss or Dr. Havard and apply, and if you're lucky, maybe you'll get in. So I saw the writing on the wall pretty early. I said, well, we got to do this nursing thing. And my first nursing job was about three years later, in 1984. And I went out to the big city in the Valley, which is Fresno, and it wasn't all RN operating room staff, so I already knew the scrub role pretty well, and so I fit in okay. And then the rest, as they say, is history, my history. Spent 20 years in various operating rooms in various roles.
Michelle: Man, I wish we could go back to the cheap college days. Right?
Chris: Yeah. Unfortunately, the thing about the cheap college days is they were also the cheap college graduate days where people didn't make very much money.
Michelle: Absolutely.
Chris: On the other hand, they didn't need it.
Michelle: Very much money, not at all. Well, so you talked about getting into surgical nursing, and I know you were a surgical nurse for a number of years, and then you kind of did a little gig in management. So tell me how you got into that.
Chris: Well, I got into management through sexist assumptions on part of my managers. Really, I'm joking about this somewhat, but I mentioned my first job in nursing was in 1984. In about 1985, my operating room manager at that time came to me and said, well, hey, you're a young guy at the beginning of your career. You are interested in becoming a manager, aren't you? And I thought, well, no, I never really thought about it, but I was fairly impressionable still at that age. And I said, well, yeah, sounds good. Where do I start? Well, you could start by taking this job on the PM shift as the charge nurse in the operating room. And so I ended up doing that for about three years, and then about 1987 or so, actually applied for an operating room manager job in another hospital. I got that. I worked that job for about two years. Then I applied for a surgical services director position in another hospital, and I did that for four years. And by that time, I was getting to be about 40 years old, and I was having some aches and pains and whatnot. And it really starts to occur to me that I should be looking at a job that I could do in the future with some disability. So I thought about teaching. I thought about risk management, I thought about quality improvement, started a master's program and kind of took off on the nonclinical portion of my nursing career if there really is such a thing as being nonclinical and nursing. And that has been now about a little over 20 years worth. So got into that in about 2001. Now I've been doing about 20 years doing that away from the bedside.
Michelle: If I'm a bedside nurse and I have the opportunity to become a charge nurse, become a manager, what kind of skills am I going to need? Like, how did your charge nurse position prepare you to go into management?
Chris: Yeah, I don't know that it really actually did that much. Probably give you some practice in prioritizing and organizing and learning what to pay attention to and what could sit for another day. I think no one's born with management skills. Everyone has to acquire them. And the more interested you are in acquiring them and the more you see them as facilitating job satisfaction, quality work, and maybe even advancing the profession you'll be motivated to learn those things. And I just was, because I saw those things. My first nursing job was in a hospital, which was unionized, and I had to belong to the union, but I didn't have to always play by the union rules. So I remember early in my career, we went on strike. I was a PM shift nurse. In the morning I walked out on Cedar and King's Canyon with a picket saying, VMC unfair to nurses. And in the afternoon I went to work. So that's sort of an odd set of behaviors now, really splitting the baby there, as it were. But I started to notice pretty early on in nursing that all the things that I saw people complaining about were really things that were in the realm of leadership and management to effect or solve. So I said, well if we're going to get anywhere, somebody's got to start working on these things. And so those are the practical skills of prioritizing organizing. But really, as I look at my management work and now I've spent four years, this last four years in a director position, patience, listening, empathy, these are really the big skills that really matter. There are people that I supervise that know a lot more about research than I do, but those people skills, listening to people, praising people when they do something really good, redirecting people, telling the truth, these are things to me that really matter as a manager or director leader.
Michelle: Well, absolutely. I've seen those qualities in you. I've talked to a lot of people who know you, and they also say that you embody all those qualities not just as a leader, but as a person. I just wanted to go back for a second because I thought this was really interesting, you kind of joked about sexism and this has been a topic in nursing regarding male nurses, that they traditionally go into the operating room, the emergency room, and management. On a serious note, do you think that there is some of that?
Chris: Oh, well, there is a fact that male and female nursing work choices and patterns are different. I haven't kept up on the research, but it seems like I could probably give you a set of work behavior characteristics and you could probably with about 80% accuracy assign those characteristic sets to a specific gender, male or female. So I think that the fact is it does exist. I guess the big question is why? So why and why always comes down to, well, is it the system or is it the individual? Is it the choices that an individual makes or is it the choices that are made for the individual? So that is the great debate that will continue long after my nursing career and life, in fact, will be over. But there are differences.
Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for kind of clarifying that. So in between these positions as a manager and then we will touch on the medication safety specialist role that you had. There was a time when you were teaching at the university level and you were teaching baccalaureate students and masters students, and first of all, what did you teach, what were your subjects? And then just talk a little bit about how you feel as a professor that you impacted the nursing profession and nurses specifically.
Chris: Yeah, well, actually my first teaching job was actually in 1986, so I was a fairly new nurse five years out of my entry to nursing school and licensed for two years. And this was a summer perioperative elective and really more of an on-the-job training type thing. But I think the experience that you're referring to, back in 2009, I was thinking about going back for my doctoral degree, which I eventually did in 2011, and I actually got an entrance, if you will, to teaching through one of my younger sisters who was in a BSN completion program. And so she was about three-quarters through the program, and the dean of that nursing school happened to be looking for a nursing instructor, a professor at the university, to teach an informatics class. And she happened to sort of throw the hook out there. Hey, do any of these students know somebody who might be interested in coming to this university and teaching this informatics class for this BSN completion program? And so my sister said, well, I don't know, my brother might be interested in doing it. Here's his number. And so I got a call and I, next couple of days drove up to see the person and sort of an odd interaction, but it worked for about ten years I worked there, and dean of the school said to me, I've been praying that a person like you would come into my life, and here you are.
Michelle: Oh, my gosh, you're the answer to prayers.
Chris: I was the answer to a prayer, so I was hired. That was my sort of interview, very nonbureaucratic. When can you start, by the way? We need you next week. And so I started teaching two nights a week at one of the campuses, two nights a week at another campus, and before long, I was doing quite a bit of work and took a position part-time as the assistant director of nursing at that program. At that time, the program was only doing BSN completion, and then after about five years, they began to do a Master's FNP program and are now in the fall, actually beginning a prelicensure baccalaureate program. So they'll be taking in students on campus for four years, graduating with the BSN degree as entry to practice. So I don't know, I mean, I don't know how many worlds I changed. I still have a lot of students who will stay in touch, and I do believe that I helped a lot of people reach their goals through nursing education, because remember, these are either BSN completion or MSN FNP students, and they're very goal oriented. I mean, they're in school to accomplish something in a short time, and they have reasons why they want to do that. So my approach has always been as an instructor, and this probably wouldn't be true in a pre-licensure program, but these are adults. They know what they want. They've already demonstrated some ability to achieve academically, to know how to act as a student, and really is my role just to appoint them to the material and ensure that they've learned it and really less about me being on stage and performing some kind of an entertainment ritual in the classroom. Not that I didn't do that on occasion, because I did want to see it, but I think that I kind of gave up classroom teaching about two years ago. I'll get back to it someday, but just life kind of got a little bit busy. My learning as a professor over ten years has been a lot less about what I do than it is about what the learner and the student do. And so it took me about five years to realize that and then made my job a lot easier and I think made the learning a lot better.
Michelle: Well, you are actually one of my professors in the same baccalaureate program, and I always enjoyed you. One of the questions I had along those lines is along those lines of being a teacher. And I've been in classes where the instructor asks questions of the students, and there's crickets chirping, and nobody says anything. And I've always thought that has to be extremely frustrating as an instructor to not have any engagement or response. Has that happened to you and how did you confront that?
Chris: Happens all the time. That's probably it's certainly very common, particularly, I think, and you don't have anything to compare it to. But I think when you do completion programs and you're dealing with people who are working full time and have their own families, and you're seeing them from 6-10 pm in the evening, they're sort of getting to the limits of their attention. So you just have to understand that 80% of an audience is just there to listen and sort of watch TV, and then you sort of rely on your interaction with the other 20% to carry the curriculum and engage, sort of by osmosis the rest of the students that are there. But I think yeah, I mean if you don't think that really shocked me, I suppose I don't know how shocking it really is. But they talk about the questions you ask people to try to draw their engagement and get them excited about what it is they're doing.
Michelle: Yes.
Chris: I sort of have a little bit of a subversive tendency sometimes, and I tend to kind of like to play around with things and people. I'll walk up to people sometimes and casually talk to them about nursing. And where do you work? I see you're a nurse. I'll say, sorry to hear that, I hope you're in school for a higher purpose. But I like to ask I always ask my students and other people, what's the definition of nursing? There is a yeah, I don't know how authoritative it is, but there is an American Nurses Association, and they have a definition of nursing. Does anybody know what it is? And I honestly have yet to run into a person who was a nurse that could tell me the American Nurses Association definition of nursing.
Michelle: Well, now, I'm curious, what is it?
Chris: Yeah, so when we follow that on, and then I'll say something like, well, how do you know you're doing it right if you don't know what it is? And if you can't explain it to people, particularly people who aren't nurses, how do you expect anyone to understand it? How do you expect anyone to value it? How do you expect anyone to support it? You know that to the question, how do you know if you're doing it right if you don't know what it is you're doing? The whole thing about if you don't have a plan, then wherever you get, I guess, is home just a paraphrase. And I probably can't quote it exactly because I've asked this question a while, but nursing is the diagnosis and treatment of the human responses to actual or potential health problems. Right? So the diagnosis and treatment so we can diagnose and treat the human responses to actual or potential health problems. So humans have a response to a broken wrist. It's not our job as nurses to treat the broken wrist directly, but we can diagnose and treat the human responses to the broken wrist.
Michelle: Okay.
Chris: I think it's important to understand what the sort of nursing orthodoxy defines the profession as being all about. So I would encourage all the nurses. Everybody has these badges with a stack of little plastic hangers on them, looks like a mini Rolodex. It's about eight or ten little things on there, algorithms for ACLs and what a code green is supposed to be, and what our mission statement and vision values are. I'd love to have nurses put something on their badge that gives the ANA definition of nursing, well, I think you should do it. That might be useful.
Michelle: I think you should do it. I see an opportunity there. One of the other roles that you held for quite a while is the most interesting one and kind of a niche, the medication safety specialist role. Tell me just briefly about that role.
Chris: Yeah, so this is, I would say, like a branch of quality improvement. The typical incumbent to this role would be a graduate-prepared nurse with some clinical experience and some quality improvement experience, and ideally some leadership experience and some educational experience. But the whole deal about a job like a medication safety specialist, at least as it was framed in my organization. It's probably similar across the United States as a role to look at the system. Look at how medications are used within the system and assess the risk for bad outcomes and misadventures and errors and work to implement system-based strategies to make it less likely that those errors would continue to happen. So looking at the system, and also because systems are made up of individuals, look at individuals. So we always want to talk about the system, and that's good, and that's a good perspective to have. But we also need to understand that their systems are operated by individuals, and so individuals bring their skills and their human behavior, which is error-prone. We all make mistakes in the workplace and to understand how the individuals in the system interact to deliver medication and make it safer for patients.
Michelle: Yeah. So along those lines, talking about system failures, I wanted you to just weigh in for a second on the Radonda Vaught case, this Vanderbilt nurse being convicted of criminally negligent homicide. She made a medication error and it resulted in the death of a woman. And so it's been predicted by the American Nurses Association, other governing bodies, whatever you want to say, and a lot of nurses, that the fallout from this is that nurses are going to leave the profession in droves because now it's getting personal and institutions know that there are system failures and that systems are made up of people, just as you said, and people fail. So what's your take on it?
Chris: It's a serious thing. I would sort of regard this case as a sentinel event, really, if you want. I'm not talking about the death of the patient, I'm talking about the prosecution and conviction of the individual. Should be a sentinel event for our healthcare system. So when we get to the point where we have an individual that's functioning in a system that allows all kinds of unsafe behaviors just to put not too fine a point on it. But in which for this bad thing to happen to this patient. There are probably 15 upstream things that had to go wrong, that go wrong every day and are permitted and sometimes promoted that things go wrong. Go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong. And at the sharp end of the go-wrongs, somebody gets killed. And then to take that person who just happened to be the one who touched it last, and convict them of some grade of murder, I tend to think the impact is not going to be as great as some people think it will. I'd love to do a little research study and pull 100 nurses and ask them if they know this person's name, and what happened. I bet you they're not five in 100 that even know about this person. I'm going to be sort of half ball on the glass here and say that the fallout if there's going to be fallout from this event, is actually going to actually be good for the profession and not just nursing, but healthcare. That this is going to be a moment at which, in hindsight, we realize that the system is not built to deal with these things and we gotta, you know, construct a new system. So I'm pretty optimistic that, you know, this will be a teachable moment for the system and for the profession. But it looks pretty ugly right now. I know a little bit about the case. I haven't followed it super closely. I don't even recall at this point if the nurse has been sentenced yet.
Michelle: No, I think it's taking place on May 13.
Chris: Yeah. So that will be something to watch for too, because there's probably a range of sentencing possibilities, and it will say something if the sentence is down at either one of those extremes of the range.
Michelle: Yes, it will be interesting. We'll keep our eyes on it. All right, so you have your doctorate of nursing practice, and that's a big deal. How did you make the decision to do that?
Chris: Well, it's a couple of drivers, I suppose they say my own driver. And it's something that I always wanted to do, was to finish school at the highest level and challenge myself to learn new skills and to sort of immerse myself in different environments, get to know different people, and get back to academics after a little while away. But I also have to give a lot of credit to the University, where I taught for ten years in the BSN and MSN programs, because when I entered the professorate as a masters prepared nurse in 2009, one of the things I had to do was sit down with our dean and make a five-year plan for my career at that university. And it was pretty well emphasized to me that 85% of the professorate have a terminal degree in their discipline. So it was actually the rare person that was not prepared at the doctoral level, which is a strong contrast from hospital nursing, where in California, 65-70% prepared at the associate degree level, particularly in the areas that I've been working in in the San Joaquin Valley. So I give credit to the school and the dean for sitting me down and saying, sort of recalling my entry into management, well, you do want to earn the terminal degree, don't you? Because everyone else here has a terminal degree, so a little bit of pressure. And there was also, which doesn't hurt any, there was also a pay differential for the terminal degree. And so, lucky for me, nursing says a lot about nursing in many ways. The education in nursing is very fragmented, and there's a lot of variety compared to medicine, for example. But nursing has, at this time, two terminal degrees. They have practice-focused degrees and research-focused degrees, and there's still some variation in the degree. So you can have a DNP or ND. And there are a few DNPs that are competitive with a Ph.D., but they tend to now be DNP is the practice degree, and the advanced practice nurses have this degree. The Ph.D. is the research focus degree, and about 10% of nurses that go on to a doctoral degree or terminal degree will choose a Ph.D., and the other 90% are choosing a DNP.
Michelle: All right, then, that led you into your current position as director of research. Along those lines, how can research help nurses specifically, and also the profession?
Chris: Well, research is about discovery at its heart. It's about bringing new knowledge into the world. It's one of the ways that new knowledge is brought into the world. And so you would have to say, well, what kind of new knowledge is necessary for nursing to become what it ought to be, could be, should be to realize its potential? What kind of new knowledge do we need? And so the answer to that question is how nursing research can help the profession grow. And even some people still say that nursing is still an emerging profession, and hasn't earned all of the attributes that have classically been attributed to professions. The examples given are law and medicine and teaching and those sorts of things. So what does nursing need to know to thrive? What does nursing need to know to achieve its potential? Those are the realm of nursing research, and there are some they run a broad range of things that are simple questions but profoundly difficult to answer, and I suppose more difficult to implement even when the answer is known. So just very esoteric things. Just people want to study attitudes toward retirement and nursing or whatever, but things that come to my mind that I wouldn't say or maybe I would that there are actually existential questions for nursing that need to be answered. Right. Why is the pipeline shrinking? Why are young people not interested in becoming registered nurses?
Michelle: Yes. Or why are nurses not interested in research? I think we've talked about this before.
Chris: Why are nurses not interested in asking the question about why the profession is having difficulty sustaining itself? Not what you were saying. We talked about this earlier. I think every physician, you could ask them, could you name three groundbreaking medical discoveries? Right? And every physician can name three groundbreaking medical discoveries. They would tell you things like the discovery of insulin, penicillin. If you ask a surgeon, they would talk about the minimally invasive surgical revolution. If you ask an ophthalmologist, they talk to you about something else, right? But the fact they would be able to talk to you about something. So better experiment after you've finished asking nurses what the definition of nursing is to ask any nurse to list three groundbreaking nursing research studies or three groundbreaking nursing discoveries.
Michelle: Yes. And then you hear crickets chirping.
Chris: Then you're going to hear crickets.
Michelle: For the most part, yeah, I'm guilty of that myself, so I have to do my research.
Chris: I'm guilty of it too. I wouldn't call myself a nursing researcher. I'm a research administrator who happens to be a nurse, a nurse researcher, or a nurse scientist, in my mind is a nurse who focuses his or her research agenda on the profession and on the challenges and attributes of the profession. And I do a little bit of dabbling in nursing research, but I wouldn't call myself a nurse scientist or a nurse researcher. It's on a very part-time basis.
Michelle: So let's say a bedside nurse seeks you out and says, I'm having this problem on my unit, or I'm having this problem that I see with patient care, and I want to look into this further. I want to get involved in research. What are the first three things that you're going to tell this person?
Chris: Yeah, well, I'm going to probably tell this person first let's see if we can define your problem or question or concern in a way that makes the issue discoverable or searchable or answerable using research methods and tools. So let's frame your question. Let's get clear on your question, right? Will there be a statistically significant difference in the incidence of patient falls on the Med-Surg unit as a function of wearing of these sticky yellow slippers? So we'll have them get as clear as we can be about the question, and then we will take that question and we will translate that question to some keywords. And then we will go to the literature and we will see what is already known and already published and what studies have already been done on your question or on your issue. So how have others, if they have attempted to answer this question, and what is the quality of the answer, what is the quality of the study? So that would be the second thing is to go to the literature, and then the last thing would be to translate the evidence from the literature into practice. There are a variety of tools for that. They're taking the findings from the body of knowledge that's been created, the nursing literature in all of its official and unofficial forms, and translating that evidence into a new way of practicing or a practice change. And I got to sort of eject an asterisk between finding the literature and translating the evidence from the literature into practice. That asterisk is to hold out the possibility that there is no evidence in the literature, that the problem hasn't been studied. And so in that gap, then, is the opportunity to do some novel research, to design a study. To answer the question yourself, that may be able to be done, it may not be able to be done. Depends on the resources that you have available to you as a nurse. If you're at Stanford, no problem. If you're in Hanford, problems.
Michelle: Okay?
Chris: When I worked in Hanford as a surgical services director, my boss used to sometimes, I'd ask for something that is way too expensive, of course, on behalf of surgeons, whatever, and he would say to me, Chris, this is Hanford, not Stanford.
Michelle: We have to say here that we love Hanford. Hanford is a wonderful little town.
Chris: I love Hanford too.
Michelle: But, yes, I get what you're saying.
Chris: But it's a resource issue because doing good research, doing rigorous research, doing research that's powered at the level that you can generalize findings and say, if it worked here, it'll work there. Those have to be set up, right? They need to have subjects in the study to detect differences or relationships, all that kind of stuff. You have to have biostats. You have to have an institutional review. You have to have places to keep data. You have to have people who can go out and do the fieldwork and collect data. And sometimes that's hard to do, particularly in the COVID environment. It costs money and human resources to do good research. And so it's not within the possibility of every nurse to do a vaccine efficacy study with 440 participants. Right, but every nurse can discover, be an investigator and lead a research study, even though the educational hierarchy of degrees would say that they're not prepared for it until the graduate level, generally speaking. But my experience has been with mentorship and with simplification of the process. Every nurse can get engaged in discovery. Every nurse can be a researcher.
Michelle: I love that, every nurse can discover.
Chris: Every nurse is discovering all day long.
Michelle: Absolutely.
Chris: Every patient interaction hides discovery somewhere. Sometimes it's not all that well hid.
Michelle: Sometimes it is pretty obvious. Right? You know, I like your, I like how you described how you would, your approach to the nurse that comes to you for help and you make it exciting. You make me as a nurse want to discover more and investigate more. And we talked about this before too, about getting some of the nurses on our unit getting excited about a journal club and just really encountering not a lot of interest. And what can we do at the bedside level, at the unit level to foster more engagement in discovery?
Chris: Yeah, well, probably change the name research to discovery. Name-changing works. And so we're not going to call research Discovery but to kind of borrow a little bit of terminology from the Magnet structure. And you probably know someday you should probably interview a nursing Magnet coordinator or something like that. In the magnet structure, they sort of bury the term research a little bit. And I think this is actually useful in bringing clinical nurses to research and to the journal club and all those kinds of things, right? Because research is not exciting to a lot of people. The terminologies and research is not exciting to a lot of people. A lot of people don't care what's a solid floor design. They don't care about ANOVAs and MANOVAs and chi-squares. So you sort of have to bring it down to, I think, discovery. Everyone can get excited about discovery. And in the Magnet world, they talk about new innovation. I'm sorry, new knowledge and innovation, right? And so part of the Magnet structure, they sort of have those four pillars of it. And one of those pillars is new knowledge and innovation. And so we're talking about research when we talk about new knowledge because it's discovery. And in innovation, we're talking about translating research into practice. So instead of calling it research, nursing research and translational research, which is not sexy at all, and only titillates, the very few, maybe the 1%, then we try to titillate and draw in, engage the 99% by talking about new knowledge and innovation, right? And who wouldn't be interested in new knowledge and innovation, right? Whatever your spoonful of sugar behind new knowledge and innovation is nursing research and translational research. But, you know, we call it new knowledge and innovation and people seem to like it a little bit more.
Michelle: I love it. And I love you. You're amazing. We have discovered so much about you today, Dr. Chris Patty, as the scientist, the pioneer, the person. And we'd like to discover a little bit more about you personally.
Chris: I'll play along though.
Michelle: We're going to play the five-minute snippet. So yeah, I'm going to bring up my pod deck. And this was created by Travis Brown, who is a creative marketing specialist for podcasters. So knowing what I know about you, that you have interest in the following subjects such as film, travel, history, the Beatles, and then we'll do like a little bit of this and that. But this is a five-minute snippet, so I'm going to start my timer. How this works is you're just going to talk very briefly about each one of these things so that we get a picture of Chris Patty, the man.
Chris: Okay.
Michelle: What's the highest peak that you have climbed?
Chris: That will be Mount Whitney. And so that is the highest point in the lower 48 states.
Michelle: What's the elevation?
Chris: It's about 14,500 odd feet, and a lot of people don't know. Will Trivia question that the county that we live in, Tulare County, is the county that has Mt. Whitney in it. So Mt. Whitney is in Tulare County.
Michelle: Didn't know it. All right, if you can vacation for a week in any historical time period, when and where would it be?
Chris: Vacation for a week? I think it'd probably be in Europe. I would say in France at the end of the second world war, at the victory in Europe in May when the hostilities ceased. Very much a sad, but also a very hopeful and celebratory atmosphere. I think that would be really cool.
Michelle: Wow. Me too. Why are you here in this lifetime?
Chris: Well, I didn't have a choice. I was brought in against my will and judgment. But I believe that I'm here to help my fellow humans achieve their goals and to help people live better lives and enjoy life more.
Michelle: What is the most unique food dish that you have had?
Chris: Well, a couple of years ago, I was in Bordeaux, France, on a wine trip, and we were in a Michelin-star restaurant, and they brought us each a little personal smoker to the table. And it was about the size of a large coffee cup, with a little white porcelain dome on top of the smoker. And then when we lifted up the little dome, there was a little piece of salmon in there being smoked. The thing was burning as a little smoker would. So this little personal smoked piece of salmon was about the size of a large capsule that you would swallow probably about 10 grams of salmon.
Michelle:  It probably cost you an arm and a leg, right?
Chris: A la carte item was about $75.
Michelle: Wow. How interesting. What books have helped you on your journey?
Chris: Yeah, well, when I was early on, I read a lot of surgical illness books, and those helped me quite a lot to understand why we're using surgery to help heal people later on. I really like the very small book. I still have a very nice leather-bound copy of Florence Nightingale's book, Notes on Nursing, What it is and What it is not. And I think it's still very applicable today, as I talked about the definition of nursing. Right. It's very important when you have a career to know what your career is and what business is. So I think that's been very helpful. And then I read a lot of history, like 20th-century military history, and I also have been reading and rereading a couple of books about pandemics, particularly the Great influenza of 1918. You can borrow it anytime.
Michelle: I want to borrow your Notes on Nursing, but if you could get drinks with three historical figures, who would they be?
Chris: Well, I would say probably one of the Greek philosophers. It could be Aristotle. Let's say we really talked about the purpose of acorns is to become an oak, and the purpose of this little human being is to become important to the human race. So, Aristotle.  I think one of the founders of our great country, maybe Thomas Jefferson, I think would be awesome and throw just a real sideways. I think maybe I would say, Adolf Hitler. Or very contemporarily, Vladimir Putin. What is your worldview all about and what are you doing? Trying to understand the enemy, as it were? A little bit, yeah.
Michelle: Well, what would you drink?
Chris: I would drink wine. I'm kind of a wine aficionado. I won't say a snob, but I know it enough to know my preferences. I know that I prefer young, old-world red wines that are very dry, but I'd probably drink a glass of wine, maybe a little bit of blue cheese with a cold Chateau IKIM Sauterne from Bordeaux.
Michelle: I love it. Well, we went a little bit over on our five-minute snippet, but it was totally worth it. Thank you so much for indulging me. And I really just love what you said about discovery. That's what it's about. And you broke down research for us in a way that we could understand it and that we could engage with it and then participate in it. And I thank you. So have a great day and I will talk to you later.
Chris: Well, thank you. Best wishes with this exciting podcast project.
Michelle: Oh, thank you.