When Omicron hit, we were planning my father’s eighty-fifth birthday celebration. We were vaccinated and boosted, so it wasn’t Dad we were worried about. It was my brother Jeff who needed extra consideration.
Few individuals are called upon to be heroes like Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy who, in choosing to stay and fight a massive, invading army, faces a real possibility of imprisonment and death. This is true courage.
Within the medical profession, there are also wars to be fought that require true courage. One thinks of the late Dr. Paul Farmer, who worked tirelessly throughout his career to bring high-quality health care to Haiti, Rwanda, and other resource-poor nations around the world.
My senior year in college, I took a course called Women and Radicalism. It was an exciting class. We studied radical movements on the left and right, with a focus on women’s participation. The course featured a weekend retreat with women activists. For two days, women took the stage to describe their causes and advocacy roles. I attended many sessions, in awe of these phenomenal women who were making a difference in the world. I noted that most of them had been thrust into their cause by a personal adverse event, such as gun violence or an environmental catastrophe.
Rosie is in the hospital, alone. She is alone because she has survived the deaths of a child, two husbands, and five siblings. “They left me behind,” she laments. “All I have are flimsy memories and yellowed obituaries.” She plucks several photos from a bedside table and stares at them, as if in pilgrimage.
Sara looked me up and down when I walked into the exam room. Her diabetes and hypertension were uncontrolled, and her PCP had asked me to counsel her.
I introduced myself as an RN and asked Sara to tell me about herself. She launched into her medical history, but I stopped her. “Tell me about Sara,” I said, “and what she likes.”
She looked startled. “Well, I’m a proud grandmother of a four-year-old,” she said. “Her name is Amy.”
In the early 1980s, I considered everyone at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia to be my friend. As a volunteer and a vestry member at the nearby Episcopal church, I would often arrive at the ER with a homeless person who had come to the church for help after being badly injured. I was so impressed with how the doctors and nurses treated these patients that I developed a real affinity for the hospital.
I remember the curtains like a mantle enfolding us, protecting us from the darkness of the night. Only a dim light glowed in the room. The thrum of the oxygen machine—dedoov … dedoov … dedoov—made it hard to sit comfortably in my recliner.
I watched his face, his hands, his upper body slowly going up and down in their own rhythm. I recalled how privileged I’d felt when his relatives asked me to watch over him in his last stage of life.
Harper Lee taught me so much in To Kill a Mockingbird, including the definition of real courage: “It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” Through caregiving, I found that I am a woman of such courage.
I stare straight ahead at the computer screen, trying to blend in with the other medical tools in the room: IV drips, ventilator, feeding pump, chest tube canisters, nurse. I listen to my patient’s mother read to him.
She’s reading from a book my mother read to me many times. Listening to the story sends me back to my childhood. I’m cuddled up in my mom’s arms, in my pink flannel pajamas, in my parents’ warm, familiar bed.
It started with a raging sore throat in the middle of the night. I rarely wake once I fall asleep, but on that particular night, I opened my eyes at 1:00 a.m. and it hurt badly to swallow my own saliva. I rolled over, took a dose of ibuprofen with water, and returned to sleep.
The eternal goal for those in the medical profession is to accomplish treating, curing, and healing our patients. This has become particularly challenging with so many encounters now limited by Zoom, time constraints, masks, compartmentalization due to specialization, and shared anxiety due to the pandemic. But the challenge is one we must meet. The integrity of our profession depends on it.
I would make the case that listening is the universal medicament—an alchemy that transcends all else in clinical medicine. It is not limited by technical skill but instead is enhanced by the health professional’s willingness to be a witness to the patient’s story.
Here’s but one example: In the 1970s, when I was practicing as a primary-care physician, if one of my patients suffered a heart attack I would ask them, “Why did you choose that day to have your heart attack?”
I was surprised by the insights my patients offered. Virtually all of them who’d suffered a heart attack were trapped in life situations in which they had lost control. For them to be truly healed, they needed help uncovering the biopsychosocial, spiritual, and ecological interrelationships in their illness. This required a profound level of listening that went
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