Healing

I entered her room and introduced myself in the usual fashion. Jennie and Mike welcomed my visit. I explained that I wrote “patient stories” at the hospital and asked if they would enjoy telling me about themselves. They readily agreed.

Mike explained that Jennie’s vital organs were shutting down. Together they agreed to hospice care for her that morning.

I arrive at sunrise to find the asphalt stretching out, dotted with steel beasts. There are no open spaces here. This the parking lot of the ER, where some of our staff are finishing their shifts, and others are about to begin.

There is no difference between day and night here. The staff works round the clock to stem the never-ending barrage of suffering and pain that comes through our doors.

I conduct a routine physical exam on you one day after you deliver your second child, moving from head to toe. Hunching down to examine your legs for any swelling, I catch a glimpse of your exposed left ankle. Inked in green on your skin are the jagged lines of an EKG signal, neighbored by an image of an eye. “What is this?” I inquire. You tell me about your first child, who was born with a heart defect and cataracts, and about the numerous trips made to the hospital soon after her birth. This tattoo serves as a reminder of the troubles you endured and the strength developed along the way.

I’ve been thinking lately about the perils of self-care. I’m an unlikely critic of anything that promotes wellness, especially among clinicians, who face daily affronts to our desire to care deeply and well for our patients. But hear me out.

We live in a consumerist society. Any notion with a glimmer of truth will be trumpeted, captioned, tweeted, and twisted into a sales pitch, whether by backyard YouTubers or major corporations. I do think self-care is important—of course I do!—but not the way most people understand it.

A kaleidoscope lit the apartment ceiling. Grinning clown faces and animated joker cards tantalized her. The air in the den hung heavy. Perhaps its ions had burst. A loud tarantella was whining in the background.

“I’ll see you soon, Dadai,” I enunciated for the third time on the video chat.

He still can’t hear me. 

Before I could repeat myself, tears swelled up in my grandfather’s cavernous eyes as he peered at me through the tiny screen. The screen that was somehow meant to bridge the immense distance between myself and my grandpa in Kolkata, India. I sighed, my heart wrenching at the sight.

Although I never met my great-grandmother, I heard many stories about her—often involving ancient healing practices and the interconnectedness of the universe. One such story was her belief in what she called the Invisible String. This string was described as existing in all living things and connecting us to one another, beyond our physical or waking state; in energy healing practices, this is called the Human Energy Field. The first time I heard this story, I felt instantly connected to her with my own inner knowing.

The scar from my appendectomy is now over my heart. Last January I traveled to have surgery that I hoped would put me back together again. “You’ll love it,” said the leader of an online group that housed no pictures of what people look like after.

“Deep Inferior Epigastric Perforator” surgery is a reconstructive procedure involving the removal, replacement and rerouting of parts. A thick layer of my midsection was rolled back like a weighted blanket and cut to be relocated above. A surgeon scraped bone off and moved an artery from one place to another. Now my lymphatic capillaries and sliced nerves are trying to regenerate. Ends are trying to find each other again.

I didn’t get my body back. I don’t love it. I don’t love winding scars where everything got put back together. But they’re mine, and I’m alive.

Days after the surgery, I stood on the deck of a hotel talking to a friend. Headlines rolled about a faraway virus. We thought it might be extreme to worry though we both, having been through life-threatening illness, knew far-fetched fears have possibility. “Watch, it will be a pandemic,” we laughed. Sort of. On the flight home, I wore

When flight attendants deliver safety instructions, they remind us of the need to put on our own oxygen masks first before we try to assist others.

As health-care professionals, our natural tendency is to focus on the well-being of others; that’s what we’ve been trained to do. We give our patients good advice regarding their physical and mental health, yet the environments we work in are not always conducive to our own well-being. The result can be burnout, which is associated with depression, which increases the risk for suicide. In fact, physicians have a higher suicide rate than the general population.

“You’ll feel better after the surgery,” my psychiatrist said, “and the cancer is cut out.” I scoffed. He knew me too well to think it would be that easy to quell my escalating anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy has never been my thing, and there weren’t enough pills in my prescription bottles to make my fears fly out the window as neatly as that 6 mm tumor would be excised from my breast.

The surgery was easy, as was the recovery. The wound healed quickly. Just five weeks later, my scar is a smooth, scarlet sliver that looks more like a careless scratch than evidence of the purposeful cutting that it was. If I were an optimist, I’d say this is a good sign. Things are going well. I’ve also gotten through my first round of chemo with relatively mild complaints. My body is responding, and healing.

Her voice trembled as she fumbled with the scrap of paper in her hands. What did I do wrong? Is this the right prescription? Am I going to die? The questions gushed from her all at once.

As a medical student on my first clinical rotation, I was still getting used to how to run these clinic visits. It seemed like no one was ever there for the reason originally listed, and somehow I always ended up with the long-winded patients that kept me in the room so long I was lucky if I made it to the physical exam before my attending ran into the room to take over. Any plan I had made to make this visit any different was quickly derailed when I heard the words: deep vein thrombosis.

I was transported back five months prior when my mother received the same diagnosis. She had a long personal and family history with varicose veins, but the new, painful swelling in one of her legs was new. I recalled the darkness of the ultrasound room, the feeling of holding my breath each time the technician paused to ask my mother a question, the unbearable waiting

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the practice of medicine is not always the practice of wellness. How optimistically I applied to join this profession out of a sense that I intuitively took better care of myself than did many of my peers. I knew that happiness and health intertwined, though my naiveté about how to rescue one if the other faltered was sorely lacking. 

Ahh, youth. Unencumbered by the kind of financial and emotional obligations I would eventually crave, back then I could restore balance with a day trip to wine country, or a chance to ski instead of study. I took up swing dancing during my surgery rotation in medical school, if only to prove to myself that my life was my own. 

Years later I chose yoga, biking, traveling. Now, in the pandemic, yoga happens in my living room. I write about little moments. I hike. I daydream about the places I once went and hope to take my children someday.

But my pastimes are not my patients’ pastimes. Often, dropping one activity suggestion after another, like feeding quarters into a slot, I hear them fall into the coin return instantly, never registering. Too many teens are