trust me...you have a story to tell

The importance of storytelling in medicine cannot be overstated. Every clinical encounter begins with the history, or story, of the patient's illness. If you are a healthcare provider or a therapist in any field, or if you're the patient, or if you're the caretaker for someone who is hurting, you are a haven for the untold narratives no one invites us to tell. Trust me, you have a story to tell. 

This is your invitation. Please, tell us your story.

Here are ten sure signs you’re resisting the urge share what you worry about, or wonder about, or fear when, instead, you could begin healing:

•       People keep telling you, “You really should write a book…” because of all you have endured and overcome, or because of your special expertise, exceptional courage, or unique perspective. But you haven’t started yet.
• ·    You tell yourself, “I’m not a writer,” even though there’s a story chiseling a hole in your heart. Maybe it caused such sorrow, or anger, or regret you can’t bear to revisit it. Or perhaps it brought such a welcome sense of relief, or gratitude, or inspiration you can’t imagine how you would put it into words. Still, you should try.
•       You insist, “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” even though you’ve been over the details in your mind a thousand times. Or more.
• ·     You actually believe that your story is so ordinary, so inconsequential, it isn’t worth the effort it would take to tell it. You convince yourself you have nothing meaningful to say, nothing new to add, nothing helpful to share. But you do. 
• ·     You like to write, but you tell yourself you’re not good at it. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation trip you up. Nothing you get on the page seems to come out right. You forget that's what revision is for. That's why we have friends, mentors, and editors.
• ·     You think you’re too busy. You’re not.
• ·     You’re afraid you’ll offend someone if you tell the truth…if you write about the surgeon who botched your surgery, or the uncle who abused you as a child, or the colleague you don’t trust. As Anne Lamott puts it:

"If people wanted you to write

warmly about them,

they should've behaved better."

~Anne Lamott~             

• ·    As a patient, you’re so sick you feel like giving up. If you’re a provider or a caretaker, you sometimes feel like quitting. Tell us why.
• ·    You harbor questions you can’t answer, doubts that won’t go away, pain that nothing can heal. All festering out of sight, even though relief is just a blank page away.
• ·    You tend to ignore opening lines that come to you when you’re driving to work, or you dismiss memories that sneak up on you while you’re mowing the lawn, or you silence snatches of dialogue that come to you in the middle of the night. Meaning, your story is begging you to get started. To, please, get started.

If, up to this point, you haven’t written about your personal experience with illness or injury, you should probably consider starting small. Not with your open-heart surgery or your son's traumatic brain injury, but the time you twisted your ankle in the backyard or sliced your finger with the kitchen knife. You remember it, right? How much it hurt. How you had to call off sick that day and trek over to the Emergency Room for an Xray or stitches.

You were probably worried about missing work. You dreaded seeing your bill. You berated yourself for having been so careless, or lazy, or stupid (not that lack of intelligence had anything to do with it). You apologized profusely for inconveniencing your family and coworkers. Perhaps you missed your child’s soccer game or dance recital that day. You felt so helpless. You swore you’d never let it happen again.

The severity of the injury wasn’t the issue. The trouble started when you surrendered to anxiety, frustration, and anger. You blamed yourself and went on to punish yourself for it. You sent discouraging and judgmental messages to your body when it was doing its best to heal…

…which, if you had been paying attention, would have amazed you. While you were ranting about how stupid and careless you were, your blood stream rushed coagulation factors to the site of your cut and stopped the bleeding. Fibroblasts made their way to the ligaments in your ankle and went to work repairing them. Naturally occurring chemicals flooded your system to reduce the pain.

Instead of chastising yourself, you could have been cheering yourself on. You might have rested instead of pushing yourself to carry on as usual despite the pain. You could have redirected the energy you squandered on self-reproach, bitterness, and embarrassment to self-care and self-acceptance. You could have acted as an advocate for your own healing, if only you had known you had the ability and the power to do it.

"Your body's ability to heal

is greater than anyone has permitted

you to believe."

~Attribution unknown~

If, as many of us now believe, you can participate in your own healing, or hamper it, imagine the role attitude, intention, optimism, and hope play in healing after a heart attack, a disabling injury, even a bout of severe depression. Imagine loving and tending to the needs of your broken body. Your ailing spirits. Your elusive dreams.

Now, imagine helping someone else heal.

"Healing yourself is connected 

with healing others."

~Yoko Ono~

jan

hocus-pocus and the role of snake oil in healing

 

Ever since I retired from the practice of traditional Western medicine, I have enjoyed exploring a host of "alternative" or "complementary" healing practices that I was taught were about as effective as snake oil as far as healing was concerned. Hocus-pocus. But I've seen them work, so I'm curious about them. My interest in these practices dates back to my experience with hypnosis in the 1970s, thanks to the work of people like Milton Erickson, widely acclaimed to be the father of modern hypnotherapy.

True story:

I was a third year medical student on my orthopedic rotation, shadowing the orthopedic resident who was on call for the weekend, when we were paged to the Emergency Room to see a woman who had slipped on the ice in her driveway and dislocated her elbow. This is a painful injury, and it usually requires sedation and strong pain medication or light anesthesia before the injured joint can be safely realigned and immobilized.

The resident I was with that night had a reputation among his colleagues as something of a maverick. He'd orchestrated his own inguinal hernia repair under self-hypnosis when he was an intern...no anesthesia needed, thank you very much...and he was known for offering hypnosis to his patients in lieu of anesthesia for certain procedures, as well. 

This was back in the 1970s when alternative approaches to healing were met with derision and even mockery by traditionally trained physicians like myself. So I was a little skeptical when the resident I was with that night offered to hypnotize the woman with the injured elbow, and she readily agreed. 

He simply instructed her to direct her gaze upward while she slowly closed her eyes and counted backwards from ten. Ten. Nine. Eight...and she was out. He relocated her elbow, wrapped it, and asked her to open her eyes. She walked out a happy woman.

I was sold. So sold, in fact, I went on to study self-hypnosis, and I eventually underwent a surgical procedure without sedation or anesthesia myself. Afterwards, I walked out of the OR and took myself  out for lunch. So I know it works...

It didn't take a huge leap of faith to move from hypnosis into a meditation practice, and from there to consciousness studies, and from there, to energy practices. All of which are considered to be nonsense in the "real" health care community where I practiced traditional Western medicine for thirty years.

"The only thing that interferes

 with my learning is my education."

~Albert Einstein~

Most mainstream medical providers deny or dismiss the validity of energy medicine...practices that are believed to free up and move internal energy. Not everyone believes that focused attention or consciousness can redirect or release energy in the body, and that this can lead to healing. But many people do believe in it. They dedicate their lives to it. They train for years. They include practitioners of therapeutic touch and Reiki, sound healers, color therapists, crystal healers, chakra and aura healers, faith healers and shamans, acupuncturists, Ayurvedic healers, yogis and Qigong healers, among many others...

"You matter...

unless you multiply yourself by

the speed of light squared.

Then you energy."

~unknown~

...which intrigues me. Not only how energy medicine works...but the fact that it works at all. And the fact that so few health care providers are aware of these techniques...or curious about them...or receptive to them, because they don't believe in them. 

"We could all use

a little more magic in our lives..."

~Steffi Black~

~Mindful guide, coach, and qigong practitioner~

 

This week I came across another practice I had never heard of. I'm curious about it, too. "Pain Reprocessing Therapy" (PRT) offers relief of chronic pain without medication, manipulation, or surgery. It has proven very effective in relieving intractable low back pain, the commonest condition that drives patients to pain management specialists. This is a mind-body practice that is based on the presumption that pain persists after an injury heals because pain circuits misfire. PRT rewires these circuits through a system of psychological techniques. It has a lot to do with mindfulness. This is the book:

The prevailing bias against these practices and techniques arises out of the usual arguments citing the placebo effect. It denies the subjective influence of the healer's presence, touch, consciousness, empathy, connection, and open heart, all of which have been shown to promote healing. It ignores the fact that the therapeutic efficacy of many traditional Western medicines and practices also depend upon the placebo effect. They work because the patient expects them to work. Because the patient believes they work. Their efficacy also depends upon the interaction between the patient and the health care provider, including his attentiveness, ability to communicate, and to instill trust and hope.

"The placebo effect is scientific proof

that we have the ability

to heal ourselves."

~Dr. Kelly Brogan~

Health care is based upon science. Upon research. Upon observational studies and outcome statistics. If you are a health care provider, or if you see one, you trust medical science. You have studied it, or observed it, or experienced healing because of it. You are also aware of its shortcomings.

Many traditionally trained physicians reject the role and efficacy of alternate approaches to healing, among them energy medicine, because they haven't studied them or tried them. This is blatantly unscientific. The true scientist is curious about things he doesn't understand. He makes an effort to learn about them. He tests them out. He tries them for himself.

As health care providers and consumers, instead of rejecting outright what we don't believe in, or understand, or trust, we should explore, observe, and evaluate for ourselves. Who knows what we might learn that will help us heal others...and ourselves.

"Skepticism is the first step 

towards the truth."

~Denis Diderot~

and...

"Truth is the basis 

of all healing."

~Barbara Schmidt~

jan

no mud, no lotus

If you are a healthcare provider in any field, or the caretaker for someone you love, you are well aware of the duality that permeates every aspect of reality...the coexistence and contradiction between joy and sorrow, between kindness and cruelty, between life and death. We feel this deeply every day in our work, but never more acutely than with the approach of the holidays. 

If you are writing about your experience, you may feel the push and pull of duality in your narrative.

First there's the story you have pictured in your mind...and then, there's the process of translating it into words on a page. It can take you from soaring with enthusiasm to slogging through the muck. You may find yourself stuck.

"No mud, no lotus."

~Thich Nhat Hanh~



Inspiration wanes, fatigue sets in, and the story line languishes. Self-doubt creeps in. And, even though the end is in sight, like a desert mirage, it fades away the closer you get to it.

"What makes the desert beautiful

is that somewhere it hides a well."

~Antoine De Saint-Exupery~



This is a lonely place for writers. Your manuscript isn't polished yet so no one else has seen it or commented on it. Therefore, you don't get to enjoy the inspiration that comes with an exchange of ideas, weighing in on suggestions from writing partners. You need a fresh infusion of incentive, like the energy that emerges when composing a query letter or submitting to an editor or agent. But, you're not there yet. This is just hard, lonely work, day after day.



How do you cope with it? 

Sometimes I'll take a little time out to dash off a piece of flash fiction, a short essay, or, like today, a blog post. It's like indulging in a little snack when you can't wait for supper.

 

Sometimes I have to tear myself away from the keyboard and polish off a few necessary chores before I can concentrate again. For example, when there's no food in the house, or I run out of clean underwear. I mean, priorities do change. Writing sometimes has to wait, especially at this time of the year. There are the holidays to plan for...gifts to wrap, baking and decorating to do. Storytelling may have to take a back seat for a while.

What can you do in the meantime?



When I'm stuck for an idea or unsure how to put one into words, I'll pick a random passage to edit and revise, backtracking a bit until I'm sure I'm on the right path again.

"Real writing begins with rewriting."

~James A. Michener~



It also helps to read something by another author on a similar topic. A couple of my go-to favorites are:

"Memoir as Medicine" by Nancy Slonim Aronie

and

"Still Writing" by Dani Shapiro

Just the process of reading beautiful writing invites the mind to get in on the action. 

Do you ever get bogged down in the middle of a project? What do you do to recharge? To move ahead? How do you get it all done?

"Many of life's failures

 are people who did not realize

how close they were to success

when they gave up."

~Thomas A Edison~

jan

the bravest thing

What is the bravest thing you've ever done?

If you're a healthcare provider, courage is sometimes required just to get through the day. Emergencies arise. People depend on you. Your knowledge and expertise may make the difference between life and death for your patient. More than a couple of times, I've pulled over at the scene of an accident before an ambulance could be summoned. I've performed CPR in the front seat of a patient's pick-up when he went into cardiac arrest before he could get into my office. I've ventilated a newborn premie in the back of an ambulance for three hours on the way to the hospital.

"Be brave my heart.

Have courage my soul."

~www.weheartit.com~

Friends comment about the courage it must have taken to run a makeshift clinic in the African bush for a week without electricity or running water. To make a house call in the middle of the night to a patient with a loaded rifle next to his bed. To take a drill to a patient's skull.

The thing is, that kind of thing didn't require courage, the way I see it. It was all part of my job. I trained for years to handle situations like these. It didn't take bravery, as much as practice and resolve. You don't think of yourself as a hero or a god when you're just doing the job you pledged to do.

"Courage is grace under pressure."

~Ernest Hemingway~

Still...the work of the healer can be scary. Problems arise that you can't anticipate or prepare for. That's when courage kicks in. When you're asked to sign the DNR order for a patient you can't save. When you have to confront a colleague about a mistake he made. When the mother dies during childbirth, but the baby survives. 

It is the difficult conversation, the tough confrontation, the tragic loss that uncover real courage.

"Courage is found in

unlikely places."

~J.R.R. Tolkien~

So, what is the bravest thing you've done? Have you comforted a sobbing child? Rescued a puppy? Forgiven an enemy?

Each of us is summoned differently. Where do we find the courage?

"You never know how strong you are

until being strong is the only choice you have."

~Bob Marley~

jan