June 2023

Having a purpose in life is as critical to one’s well-being as food and shelter. I’ve learned, over my 25 years of doctoring, that a sense of purpose both helps us develop our identity—our sense of self—and connects us to something greater than ourselves.

I knew the private room at the busy teaching hospital was a rare luxury.

I had spent the entire day having invasive and uncomfortable tests; I was in the hospital because my left kidney had been partially destroyed by an interventional radiologist who had failed to distinguish between a renal cyst and a renal diverticulum. Thus my left kidney had been ablated with alcohol—twice. I was in pain, infected, and bleeding internally.

“From dust we came, and to dust we shall return,” she whispered to me. Her face brightened up her compact 80-square-foot room. I held her hand, decorated with jewels from all around the world. She had just been transferred here from another memory care facility, and I’d decided to sit down with her every Sunday. Stacked in her lap were a Bible, a devotional book, and a journal. “What do you write in there?” I asked, pointing to the beaded journal.

I feel like a salmon swimming upstream, constantly fighting the current: the current of a system designed to dehumanize students, residents, and patients—a system in which “health” and “care” are often afterthoughts, while profits and media image take precedence.