fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Decades

I’ve been aboard a “choo-choo train” for decades. I traveled to college, to medical school, to family medicine residency, to become an attending physician, then a medical administrator. Each new locale exposed me to a novel culture, with new languages, rules, and personalities—forcing me to learn different ways of thinking and relating to my environment.

How does one begin to synthesize the mass of information taught in medical school, regurgitate it during hospital rounds, reconstitute it to make swift decisions about life-and-death matters while sleep-deprived, emotionally drained, and feeling like an imposter? Where is the Duolingo tutorial for corporate vocabulary: low-hanging fruit, seats at the table, stakeholders?

Grit helped me survive these all these foreign cultures—if I kept digging and pushing, I could crack the code and blend in with my peers.

But when I became a parent, my train took a detour, and these new challenges overwhelmed me. How does one juggle the unique needs of each person in a family, balance personal values with dominant cultural mores, and make endless decisions that might be inconsequential individually but seem monumental in the aggregate? Grit propelled my determination to raise my children as kind, competent people and to provide them with emotional and physical resources that were unavailable to me as a child.

Grit became the foundation of my life’s work—to alleviate suffering via empathy, compassion, and love. Because of my MD degree, people fast-track me into intimate parts of their stories and bodies in pursuit of healing and recovery. As a parent, I have a front-seat role in shaping the lives of my children. When I sit with a patient or a loved one, bear witness, tune into their emotions, and connect with their inner truth, profound relationships are built, and meaningful work is accomplished. Grit has molded these parts of my identity, purpose, and sense of self, and, for the most part, has served me well.

Today, my nest is empty and I am in the latter half of my career. Motherhood no longer shapes my daily routine. My professional ambitions have softened around the edges; I no longer must prove to myself that I belong in my roles. I’ve promoted myself to conductor of the choo-choo train. Grit is my fuel. My old maps are obsolete, and I am now searching for new tracks to follow. How do I use the same grit that’s allowed me to help others, to help myself?

Pam Adelstein
Newton, Massachusetts

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2 thoughts on “Decades”

  1. Great meditation on how we drive ourselves. Helping others is worth the drive, but can we recognize when and how we need to help ourselves?

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