a sigh of relief

 

 

 

True story:

 

When the nursing home called, my mother was already on her way to the emergency room. She’d been experiencing a deep cough and increasing shortness of breath for two days. When her oxygen levels fell to dangerously low levels, her doctor ordered her off to the hospital.

 

I left as soon as I got the call, hoping to get there ahead of her because you see, by this point in her decline, my mother had lost the ability to speak. She didn’t suffer from dementia. Rather, her inability to communicate was the cumulative result of multiple small strokes. I knew she would be scared and confused, and ultimately frustrated by her inability to express herself. As sick as she was, she would be unable to give her medical history or answer questions. Nevertheless, I had no doubt she would receive excellent care—the ER staff would start an IV, administer oxygen, get a chest X-ray (and a scan if needed), draw her blood, and monitor her vital signs. She would receive antibiotics, or medications for her heart, or anticoagulants depending on the test results (pneumonia vs heart failure vs pulmonary embolism). If worse came to worse, she would be intubated. The doctors and nurses would do everything they could for her automatically and efficiently, without a second thought.

 

Without knowing a thing about her.

 

“You treat a disease: you win, you lose.

You treat a person: I guarantee you win.”

~Patch Adams~

 

When I got to the emergency room, Mother was sucking down oxygen via IPPB. She was weak and pale, but alert. The minute I pulled the curtain back and stepped to her bedside, she relaxed. A faint smile of recognition and relief appeared. She closed her eyes and squeezed my hand as if to say healing could now begin.

 

“A kind gesture can reach a wound

that only compassion can heal.”

~Steve Maraboli~

 

I kept an eye on the monitors that surrounded her bed while I sat with her and explained what was happening and why. I requested an extra blanket for her. I answered the nurses’ questions. I ached to know the results of the tests the doctors had run, what her diagnosis was, what was in store for her. Through it all, I kept a smile on my face while all the worst-case scenarios played out in my imagination.

 

“Isn’t it fascinating

how long a few minutes can seem

when you are completely alone

with not a familiar face in sight?”

~Kirby Larson~

 

Imagine the relief I felt when the ER physician returned to check on her…when he drew the curtain aside and I recognized a trusted colleague, a man I knew to be compassionate, gentle, and wise. Like my mother did when she saw me, I relaxed as soon as I saw him. I smiled with a deep sense of relief and gratitude. I could talk to this man and I knew he would listen. He would treat my mother like his own, and me like a sister. As if we were family. I felt as though healing had already begun.

 

*

 

This story is intended to convey the healing power of the personal relationship between the physician and the patient…the sense of relief a familiar face can bring when everything else is foreign and frightening to the patient. It speaks to the importance of trust and confidence in the healer’s character and expertise. It should remind us to regard every patient with compassion, and to treat every patient with the same respect, kindness, and care we would extend to our best friend, and to our own family members because:

 

“I’ve learned that people will forget

what you said.

People will forget what you did,

but they will never forget

how you made them feel.”

~Maya Angelou~

 

jan

 

 

 

 

 

living in awe

 





One of the perks of being a physician is that you get to live in a state of perpetual awe. It starts with the first pass of the scalpel on your first day in the anatomy lab. It continues as you tease out every organ, blood vessel, and nerve in the body you’ve been assigned to dissect. A sense of wonder punches you in the gut the first time you hear a beating human heart, and you realize that your own heart has been beating steadily and predictably without any effort on your part since before the day you were born.

“Stay in a state of

gratitude and awe.”

~Wayne Dyer~

You’d have to be a toadstool not to be mystified by the anatomy, physiology, and psychology of your very own body. You’d have no choice but to believe in miracles if you understood the way a broken body heals, what it takes for an open wound to close, how a lifeless heart can pick up the beat again. Don’t even ask what happens during sex.

I studied medicine for seven years and practiced for over three decades so I understand how the body heals. I know what it takes to keep it up and running. Most of the time, I know how to fix it when something goes wrong. Most people don’t. They get out of bed in the morning and expect their bodies to work.

The problem is sometimes they don’t. We take good health for granted until something goes wrong. The cancer comes back. The paralysis turns out to be permanent. The depression won’t lift. Sometimes the afflictions of the body go beyond its ability to heal. Beyond the physician’s ability to help.

“Every patient you see

is a lesson in much more than

the malady from which he suffers.

~Sir William Osler~

For example, Pat’s son has undergone forty operations to correct the disfiguring wounds caused by the explosion that blew the side of his face away. At first, the doctors didn’t think he would live. Now he’s not so sure he wants to. Each time he goes back for the next stage in reconstruction, the incisions heal. Not so his spirit. The hospital scares him. His reflection repulses him. He wants this to be over—the repairs, the rehabilitation, the pain. Life itself. His wounds may heal but he still has a hole in his heart.

Pat would gladly take on his pain, frustration, and despair if she could spare him a lifetime of misery. She would do anything to restore him to the brave, handsome young man he was before his deployment. If his lot in life is physical and mental anguish, hers is paralyzing heartache. He feels abandoned and she feels helpless.

Helpless—the way a doctor feels when a patient under his care gets worse and there is nothing he can do about it. When he has tried everything and nothing has worked. When he feels like a failure—so not God, as is sometimes still expected of physicians.

And that’s a problem. The downside of doctoring is that sometimes the patient gets worse despite your noblest efforts. The cancer spreads. The heart fails. The wound won’t close. There is nothing more you can do. You concede that it would take a miracle for the patient to recover. All you really have left is prayer.

But what if you don’t believe in prayer?

What would it take to change your mind?

Brenda was forty years old when she went in for her first routine mammogram. Yes, she performed regular breast self-examination. No, she hadn’t felt anything unusual, nor had her husband, a breast surgeon who would have known something was wrong had his highly trained fingertips come up against a lump there. Nor did she have a family history of breast cancer that put her at risk. Nothing.

Which is why the X-ray report came as such a shock. A large mass occupied most of her left breast and the calcifications in it looked suspicious. While she explained to her children why she had to go into the hospital, her friends and family stormed the heavens with prayer. You can imagine the collective sigh of gratitude and relief that went up when the surgical reports came back negative. When they failed to turn up a single cancer cell.

“Impossible,” the doctors said. They re-examined the X-rays. They pulled the slides out and went over them again in excruciating detail, searching for even one abnormal cell. They were left to shrug their shoulders in disbelief. She was healed. Her surgeon couldn’t explain it, but her friends and family hailed it as a miracle and they attributed it to prayer.

“Be patient toward all that is

unsolved in your heart

and try to love

the questions themselves.”

~Rainer Maria Rilke~

On the other hand, the doubting Thomases explained it away based on the limits of technology. After all, they insisted, not every X-ray is accurate. It might have been caused by human error. Perhaps the planets were aligned in her favor that day. They would accept any explanation but they would not acknowledge the triumph of a medical miracle. In cases like this, the faithful celebrate while skeptics ramp up arguments to explain it away, and doctors are left to shake their heads in disbelief.

Or in awe, depending on how you see it.

“I think this is how

we’re supposed to be in the world~

present and in awe.

~Anne Lamott~

jan