Genetic Counselor Reinvented

I have a confession to make. Now that I am half way through my 60s – not exactly elderly, but too old to die young – I have become increasingly insecure about my relevance to the field of genetic counseling. My ethos, counseling style, and knowledge base are still anchored in the previous century. My anxieties are heightened by practicing in a field dominated by young, very bright, highly trained people. I fret that I am viewed by my colleagues with bemused, grandfatherly respect and not as a key player who is relevant to the practice of genetic counseling or to the many exciting pathways that the profession is pursuing. Call it fear of being thought of as a vetus crepitu (Old Fart sounds so much better in Latin).

Then too there are the demands of employers to see ever more patients, the promise/threat of artificial intelligence to replace/supplement genetic counselors, and increasing demands to access genetic counseling through means other than a brick-and-mortar face-to-face interaction. It’s enough to make me want to call it quits and enter a peaceful retirement where my stressful decisions will be “Should I sleep another hour?” or ” Which show should I binge-watch – all 5 seasons of ‘The Wire’ or ‘Breaking Bad’?” Omar, Stringer Bell, Mr. White, Leonel and Marco Salamanco (“The Cousins”), Gustavo – I hardly knew ye and heartily miss ye.

I was mulling over these thoughts and insecurities the other day when I had an Aha! Eureka! Fall-Off-My-Ass moment that will revitalize my moribund career and make me the envy of genetic counselors of all ages. I have 36+ years of experience with more than 20,ooo patients and a shopping bag full of clever counseling phrases (“Families can be complicated sometimes.” Pause, look directly at the client, and give a slight , knowing, supportive nod of the head. or “There’s no need to rush into making a decision about genetic testing in your situation. Testing  is important  – pause an extra beat to focus attention on the next words – but not urgent.”). I have parlayed this experience into an e-asset by reinventing myself as a biotechnochimaera of a genetic counselor and a chatbot. Ecce – ChatBob!

Deciding to become ChatBob wasn’t exactly brain surgery. Well, actually, it was brain surgery. My cousin, a brain surgeon, and my niece, a computer whiz, worked together to implant a variety of neuronanochips, teeny-tiny receivers, micro-routers, and other itty-bitty doodads into my cerebral cortex and other important sections of my brain. Anyone with an internet connection can now access my brain for the purposes of genetic counseling. The microrouters and neuronanochips allow multiple people to simultaneously  access my CNS. I don’t know how that stuff works; my niece explained it to me but I didn’t really understand a word she said. But I don’t have to understand how it works because it does it’s job automatically.

Okay, the external portion of the hardware is a bit, uh, geeky but, hey, it’s the beta-version. Undoubtedly some product designer from Apple will eventually turn it into a fashion statement that will make even the hippest hipsters suffer a serious case of cool-envy.

Because I have been a genetic counselor for so many years I have heard every possible question and because I can do it in my sleep, patients in any time zone have access to ChatBob 24/7. The neuro-computer connections hook up to a deeply embedded part of my unconscious mind so I am usually unaware that a counseling session is even taking place (admittedly, that sometimes used to happen when I saw patients in person too). I can binge watch whatever television series I am in the mood for while the Counseling and Education Center of my brain – the striatum bovis stercis – subliminally and simultaneously counsels dozens of patients. Labs download test results directly into my brain which then sends a message to patients’ computers so they can immediately access their reports and my clinical interpretation.

I am in great demand by laboratories and hospitals wanting to free themselves of the burden of the salaries of multiple genetic counselors. I can be easily integrated into Epic or any other electronic health records platform. Researchers looking to allow people from all demographics to have easy access to genetic counseling in research projects are pounding on my e-door. ChatBob is a researcher’s dream because all the counseling is done by one counselor so they don’t have to control for counselor variability in skill, experience, or style. ChatBob is scalable to a population level;  hey All of Us , why not take All of Me? Telegenetic counseling startups are pleading with me to replace their entire staff.  I’ve had inquiries from Google wondering if they can implant advertisements in my brain for products related to patients’ genetic test results.

There have been some mishaps and a few crossed wires. These have mostly been the result of my cousin being a disbarred neurosurgeon (one of the disconcerting things about being awake during neurosurgery is that you can hear the surgeon say “Oops” in the middle of the procedure) and because my niece, being a teenager, has more important things to pay attention to than the details of her uncle’s neurocircuitry. So occasionally when a patient asks a dumb question the reptilian part of my brain overrides my Counseling Center and responds with something like “What a dope. Weren’t you paying attention to what I just neurotransmitted? I’ve already said twice that daughters can inherit a BRCA1 mutation from their fathers and that genes absolutely cannot skip generations.” A few patients have managed to integrate themselves into some of my dreams. It made for some awkward moments when a couple of patients managed to tap into the primal portions of my brain that house my implicit biases, fantasies, fears, and unfiltered thoughts. But hey, that’s to be expected in the pioneering stages of any world-changing technology. Kind of like Alexa “inadvertently” listening to your private conversations. Employers are not troubled by these occasional mishaps because all they care about is that I am counseling high volumes of patients and saving them oodles of money.

I don’t recommend other genetic counselors biotechnoconverting to ChatBob because I want all the business and I want to have the best presentations at national meetings. Plus, it is kind of a permanent thing, so you can’t just back out after using it for 90 days or whatever. And you have to do lots of explaining to skeptical TSA workers at airport security checkpoints. But these are small sacrifices to make in order to stay in front of the genetic counseling peloton. I will be seeing you in my rearview mirror for the next 10 years.

Thanks to Emily Singh for realizing the ChatBob graphic