Retired Mitchell doctor releases songs inspired by experiences with his patients
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Retired Mitchell doctor and musician Mark Diotallevi recently wrote, recorded and released four songs inspired in part by his experiences helping patients and friends with difficult and even fatal medical diagnoses over the past 35 years.
After a 35-year medical career, 32 of which he worked at Mitchell, Mark Diotallevi has recently released four songs inspired in part by his experiences with his patients. Pictured is Diotellevi sitting in his music studio at his home in Stratford. (Galen Simmons/The Beacon Herald) Content of article
A retired Mitchell doctor uses his 35 years of medical practice — and the relationships he’s forged throughout that career — as inspiration to write and record music as he processes the grief that comes with working as a family doctor .
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While Mark Diotallevi has had a passion for listening to and playing music since he was a boy when he first heard The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, his forays into performance have been largely limited to playing the piano at his home music studio in Stratford playing and taking the stage with bands like Crackerjack Palace, a local classic rock cover combo he co-founded with friends and fellow musicians in 2004.
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Diotallevi had always toyed with the idea of writing music in his head — even writing down song ideas and lyrics over the years — but he didn’t have time to fully flesh out those ideas and set them to music until the COVID-19 pandemic. which kept him out of the office for up to six days and then retired in June 2021.
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“It’s been a wonderful career,” Diotallevi said of his work as a general practitioner. “You get so close to people. … I remember giving birth to a baby one day and it was dead. It’s this huge, emotional, traumatic thing and you’re in the middle of it, but you have to stop and go into the office and see 40 patients. You really learn to love these people because you know everything about them and they are both friends and patients. So if one of them gets a terrible disease or dies, there is no time to really grieve.”
To process decades of grief and realize his full potential as a musician, Diotallevi enlisted the help of his Crackerjack Palace bandmates – Tom Elliott, Barry Klein, Dean Jutzi and Grant Heywood – as well as St. Marys musician Stephanie Martin, the Canadian jazz singer Mary Lou Sicoly and musician, composer, producer and arranger John Ebata to help him record and release four singles late last year.
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Three of those monthly songs—Shadows of Men, Symptom Attic, and Platinum Skies—were directly inspired by experiences with his patients. Shadows of Men, for example, served as a commentary on how Diotallevi’s male patients were often reluctant to open up about their medical concerns, while Symptom Attic takes a tongue-in-cheek look at what might be going on in the mind of a doctor surveying their patients to trying to get to the root of their symptoms.
“Platinum Skies shows how impressed I have been with my patients—young women in their late 30s or 40s—who are developing breast cancer,” said Diotallevi. “They’re busy, they’ve got a job, they’re raising kids, and all of a sudden they have this huge, unplanned thing. What amazed me was how they take care of everyone. They take care of the kids, they take care of the husbands – husbands can be useless sometimes – but they never stop taking care of them even when they know they’re going to die.”
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While this song is an emotional tribute to women’s courage, Diotallevi decided to collaborate with Stratford photographer Terry Manzo to further underscore this point by producing a music video. The video features photos of his patients and friends suffering or dying as a result of their own cancer journey, coupled with powerful but beautiful local imagery captured by Manzo. The video even includes images of real cancer tissue slides from Stratford General Hospital’s oncology department.
“It helps because not only is it a tribute to them, but how does a doctor mourn the loss of all these wonderful people?” said Diotallevi. “I always asked myself as I retired, ‘Will all of this happen to me when I have time to think back?’ So I coined this little term: “turning medicine into music”. I take all of these experiences – emotional, hard stuff – and channel them into music.”
All three songs and the video for “Platinum Skies” as well as Diotallevi’s fourth song “Phases of the Moon” with cover artwork by Mitchell illustrator Valerie Chessell can be heard and streamed on www.musicamedici.com Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and most other music streaming platforms.
Diotallevi says he plans to continue writing, recording and releasing new singles on his website this year, with the ultimate goal of having enough for what could become his debut album.
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