Through an irreverent and sensitive musical, cancer doctor (and singing comedian) Stuart Bloom pushes back against burnout

Jared Kaufman, Pioneer Press
·5 min read

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “Life is like a…”

Did you say “flatbed truck”?

That’s how Dr. Stuart Bloom sees it, at least. Each of us is riding in the bed of a pickup, facing backward. We can clearly see the bumps on the road we’ve already traveled, and maybe we can sense when we’re going uphill or turning a corner. But we have no idea where the truck is going or when it’ll stop, the oncologist-slash-musical-comedian said.

After two decades as a practicing cancer doctor in the Twin Cities — and a decade previously as a working actor and comedian in New York City — Bloom, 65, is now on perhaps the third act of his career. He still sees patients, but primarily teaches University of Minnesota medical students to be more skilled and empathetic clinicians.

Oh, and occasionally, he stages an original musical about burnout among medical providers.

The musical, “How to Avoid Burnout in 73 Minutes: A Minimally Invasive Musical Procedure,” has sold out three multi-night runs including its premiere in 2019, and it’s returning to the Southern Theater in Minneapolis — probably its last revival, Bloom said — in May.

Tickets for the show, which runs nightly at 7 p.m. from May 16 to 19, are $25 at burnoutmusical.com. Students, as well as medical professionals and clinic staff, can get in for $10. The show stars Bloom and Eric Ringham, a former journalist, and is directed by Peter Moore.

‘We’re all processing life’

Bloom’s own journey on the great F-150 of life started in the Minneapolis suburbs, where he scored lead roles in plays and musicals in high school.

After college, he moved to New York City — you know, “to be rich and famous” — and took graduate acting classes at New York University, wrote a musical, joined local and touring casts and performed singing stand-up comedy sets around town throughout his 20s.

Not long after Bloom turned 30, though, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Bloom’s wife, Carolyn, whom he met as a teenager at Jewish summer camp, began reading a book by an oncologist, and Bloom picked it up as well.

Bloom was moved and inspired. What if he, too, became a cancer doctor? No matter that he hadn’t taken a science class since high school; he’d start at the beginning.

“I was taking biology, I was 30, sweating, around all these 17-year-olds writing things down,” he said. “I would call my wife from a payphone and just hyperventilate.”

As he progressed through medical school in New York and a residency and specialized training back in the Twin Cities, he wrote satirical songs. When he became a practicing oncologist, at age 43, he wrote satirical songs. Some he shared with his classmates and colleagues, but most were composed privately to process each day’s emotions.

“I’m around people all the time who die,” Bloom said. “As an oncologist, you’re with people and care about them greatly, and they die. I see that over and over again.”

Eventually, he noticed similar themes popping up in his songs: feeling emotionally exhausted and detached and weary, wondering if his work even mattered. In short, burnout. Maybe these feelings are worth sharing onstage, he began to think.

Burnout among medical providers is becoming a crisis, made worse by — and, in turn, worsening — staffing shortages many clinics face. Between half to two-thirds of physicians experience burnout regularly, per the American Medical Association, and nurses in the Twin Cities have been vocal about it. Many leave medicine altogether. Some take their own lives.

Both in the musical and in conversation, Bloom is clear-eyed in identifying a major cause of physician burnout: Health care administrators who are incentivized to run clinics and hospitals like corporations that need to turn profits.

“Many people in medicine feel like they’re just being ridden by people who want to make money,” Bloom said. “It’s just all about the money and not about patient care, not about establishing relationships with other human beings.”

And we live in a society that fears death, he said, that sees aging as something that can be technologically reversed and dying as some sort of personal failure. Even with modern medical science, some cancer patients can be cured, and others simply cannot: An especially hard pill to swallow for the doctor invested in treating them.

For an oncologist, combating burnout means confronting one’s own complicated feelings about death, Bloom said.

“Just because we all die doesn’t mean everything that came up to that point doesn’t matter,” Bloom said. “It’s all about connecting with another human being. That’s maybe why we’re here, or something. It’s just so important, and that other stuff is just bulls***.”

Being simultaneously irreverent and sensitive is, and has always been, how Bloom pushes back against corporatized medicine and personal feelings of burnout. When medical students observe him interacting with his patients — over 350 of whom have followed him to the university to continue seeing him, he said — their jaws drop.

“They’re like, ‘You can’t say ‘f***’ to a patient!” Bloom said. “So I turn to (the patient) and am like, ‘Can I say ‘f***’ to you?’ They go, ‘f*** yeah!’ So I’ve just had these very intense, great relationships, which have sustained me.”

This, really, is at the heart of “How to Avoid Burnout in 73 Minutes,” Bloom said. After all, the show follows an oncologist named Stu — “so it’s a big stretch for me,” he joked — who must dig himself out of the deepest trenches of burnout and rediscover the meaning of his work and of connecting with other people, all of which become more meaningful when done creatively, he said.

“We’re all processing life,” Bloom said. “Well, some people don’t. But you probably should. And if you process it in a creative way, I think that’s what they call art.”

If You Go

What: Dr. Stuart Bloom, a popular local oncologist, is performing his original show “How to Avoid Burnout in 73 Minutes: A Minimally Invasive Musical Procedure,” starring himself and Eric Ringham, directed by Peter Moore

When: 7 p.m., May 16, 17, 18 and 19

Where: Southern Theater; 1420 Washington Ave S, Minneapolis

Tickets: $25 ($10 for students/medical professionals); burnoutmusical.com/shows

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