Monthly Archives: April 2020

When do we need heroes?

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In movies and books with simple plots heroes have capes and big muscles. They drive decked-out cars and never compromise their morals. They are always good. The problem is, creatures like that don’t exist.

Heroes do exist though. They just aren’t as straight forward and flashy as blockbusters make them seem. We don’t usually notice them. As the saying goes, “A job well done goes unnoticed.”

Heroes use their precious time in selfless acts. Those acts need not be large, but sometimes are. Heroes don’t seek acknowledgement. They don’t expect thanks. They are driven by something within. They are driven by a belief that the world can be better and that helping others is worth some personal loss.

Being a hero always comes with a price. The price isn’t always steep, but sometimes it is. No one is always a hero. None of us are like superman.

Everyone has opportunities to be a hero at different points throughout their life. Those who become heroes step up and take those opportunities to help others more often than they let the opportunity go untaken. Those who can’t act on those hero opportunities aren’t bad—they’re just human.

Few can dedicate most of their time to others. Life is more complicated than that. Personal need is real. That’s why it’s amazing when someone goes out of their way to help others often. Being a hero doesn’t come with a job title. Becoming X doesn’t mean you are selfless. Becoming X may afford you more opportunity than becoming Y does to be selfless. Some jobs are centered around helping others, but only doing the job well achieves that goal. The bigger point is that we all can be heroes. Regardless of what profession we do or place we live or activities we undertake, choices are made every minute of every day in terms of how we act and treat others. What makes some people exceptional on the hero scale is how often they take a loss and lend a hand.

I think it is important to be grateful for acts of kindness and service. Not just now, but always. I also think little acts pile up. It’s worth noticing small acts just as it is worth acknowledging something large like a life saved. We can always thank those who are kind. We can always strive to be kinder. Times like these, when so many folks are sick, make it easier to notice how others are sacrificing for us or our family. But, truth be told, people are heroes every day. Just like someone could use our help always.

The circumstance of COVID19 remind us that we can make a difference in other’s lives. But, the need for heroes will not end with COVID19, just as it did not begin there. COVID19 has given us a window to view our inner strength. It has made us pause and observed those around us. I think hard times renewed our reverence for helping. Let’s keep the value of others sacred long past when the pandemic fizzles. Because, when the pandemic ends, all of life’s other troubles will continue.

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The Mountains

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These days between the hours of studying, the doctorhood quest unfolding slowly and quickly at the same time, I find myself hiking whenever time allows. It’s difficult to describe what I find in the forest as I climb to a mountain’s peak. Some days I go quickly, not observing the trees and moss as I forge up the trail. Other days I step slowly, methodically looking at the ferns and the rocks and the sun rays that scatter across the forest floor.

Sometimes my mind buzzes with thoughts—of friends, family, and school. Of puzzles I still have left to solve or chores that await me when I get home. But, more often as time goes, I find my mind mostly empty. An uncommon feeling in my daily life in town. As I get lost in thoughtless contemplation, the chipmunks make me smile as they scuttle around me and the grouse make me jump as they burst into flight before I see them. The sound of their wings is in stark contrast to the silent trees around me.

I stop for a sip of water partway up a steep stretch of trail. My forehead is crusted with salt from sweating. I feel my heart pounding. The wind picks up and the trees creek and groan. I look up and see their branches waving. Even a brief pause allows my breath to slow before I hoist my backpack to my shoulders again. Onward.

I’ve done enough trails to know which rocks are most likely to make me lose my footing. I avoid them. Mud jumps from the trail to my pants. The trail gets steeper and I shed a jacket layer. Once taking off the layer, I climb higher and the wind gets stronger. I put the jacket back on. It’s a dance of layers—just enough to stay warm, not so many that I roast. I sweat regardless.

As I climb the final pitch to the mountain top I have on my warmest layer—in summer just a windbreaker and in winter a hefty coat. I hike so much, there are many days when I get to the highest rock and there is no view. Clouds never did bother me, so the clearness of the day doesn’t impact my decision to take to the hills. When it is sunny and clear at the summit, the landscape around my mountain stretches away from me. I think about what all the distant hills and valleys have seen, countless stories they can’t tell me.

Some days the wind threatens to push me over as I pause at the summit. On days when I can see the mountains beyond my mountain, I ignore the wind and take time to watch the sunshine. The rolling hills and fields below are a patchwork of cloud shadows and sun patches. Beyond them are the mountains of some other state. When I hike in Vermont, the mountains beyond are always pointer than the one I climbed. The green mountains were scraped by glaciers and, therefore, have softer features than their neighbors in New York and New Hampshire.

I don’t doddle as I descend to my car. My heart is filled by the fresh air of the summit. I’m ready to return to the hustle of regular life by the time I get back to the parking lot. At the same time, as I turn my car toward home, I’m already daydreaming of my next hike. The mountains don’t let me forget them, no matter what adventures I have waiting for me in the lowlands. 

Burnout

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Alarm. Study. Class. Study. Eat. Study. Bed. Alarm. Study. Class. Workout. Study. Study. Bed. Alarm…Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Sometime in the future substitute work for class and study.

My sister and I have a term for the life leading up to burnout. We call it living like a robot. It’s a life where work and/or school consumes you and sometimes you fit in sleep and things that make you happy. Most of the time in the robot life you simply work and wish you were sleeping.

The robot life is unavoidable sometimes if you have hard goals. I have always justified it by knowing when it will end. I’ve had several bouts of that life with years of rest between. Most of my undergrad I was a robot. My two years of post-bacc, pre-med studies plus all the work piled on top were some of the worst years I’ve known. Medical school is the first time I’ve not worked as I studied since middle school. It’s nice to have one job, just medical school. But, honestly, it’s still hard.

Medicine is cursed with a heavy dose of the robot life. This is partly because physicians have peoples’ lives in their hands, so expectations are high. It is partly because the type of people who become physicians are A types and have high personal goals. It is partly because health is ubiquitous and illness unavoidable. As humans, our ability to reach our full potential is partially determined by our health. If we are in pain or ill, we can’t do all the things we would if we felt well.

Medical school and then working as a doctor are challenging because the hours can be long. They’re also draining because the work is complicated and requires focus and lots of puzzling through piles of clues to find the best answer. The pressure is high because the puzzle directly impacts a human’s life. And depending on the gravity of the puzzle, the answer might impact a whole family.

Time and intellectual challenge aren’t all that makes medicine difficult. It’s a team sport, so office politics and business relationships come into play. But even teamwork isn’t the hardest part of medicine. Medicine is an emotional job. People who come to us as patients die. They lose function. They lose the ability to lead the lives they’ve always led. There are many happy outcomes, but not all patients’ stories end with joy. The sad outcomes add up as time goes on.

My time in healthcare as an EMT showed me that no individual patient impacted me unbearably. However, there are days when I feel the weight of all the patients I’ve helped. For example, I felt heavy after the last CODE I worked before I left the ED for medical school. A CODE is when you do CPR, shock, ventilate, and take other measures to try to revive a person whose heart has stopped.

That night I closed the curtain on a 30-something-year old with a wedding ring who hadn’t been identified yet. He was dead before he arrived, but we did CPR anyway. I was one of the last to leave his room. I never leave a dead patient before ensuring they’re presentable for family. CODEs are messy. If the family isn’t there to see us work, I see no need for them to experience the mess. I knew sometime in the night his partner would learn he was dead.

Tucking in that patient right before I ended my shift was hard. The death rested on top of the morning I walked into the ED to find teens on the phone crying. They, the teens, were calling their family to tell them their mother and uncle had died. Odd to have children deliver news most adults barely can. The sadness those teens felt added to the day I cleaned two CODEd patients back-to-back so they wouldn’t be bloody and dirty when their family arrived to say goodbye. After tucking in the second of these, I walked out of the room to find a visitor approaching. I interceded and joined her, but only upon entering the room did I realize she, the daughter, didn’t know her mother was already dead.

The sad endings add up. But, so do the good journeys and happy endings. The patients who turn our days around by sharing the most amazing stories or giving advice that is perfectly wise. Days in healthcare are brightened by visitors who show raw love toward someone stuck in a hospital bed. I’ve seen true love hiding in ED rooms on multiple occasions. It was working with old couples in the ED that showed me how I’d like to age.

It’s no surprise between the stress of the job and the rigor of the schedule that doctors and medical students burn out. However, knowing our challenges gives us the knowledge we need to persevere. Even within the field of medicine there are many decisions we can make to suit our goals. It begins with specialty and is followed by location and type of hospital. We have the information we need to know how a specialty, location, specific hospital, and extra projects we take on will impact our life or encroach on free time. We can decide, within the scope of meeting our obligations, when we wish to do extra and when we wish to do the minimum. Most importantly, we know that no state is permanent unless we let it be. 

I think at the root of avoiding burnout is being honest with ourselves and checking in with ourselves. There are stretches of school and work that must be survived. The robot life must be lived sometimes. But, amidst the madness we must decide when it will end. We can choose to rein things in when needed. We can choose to prioritize family or life outside work. Of course, to do this, we must know ourselves and what makes us happy. Once we know where we find happiness we can fight for it as fiercely as we fight for our patients. In the end, if we are not well, we can’t help anyone else at the level we can when we are in good health.

People Get Sick – Some Rise and Some Fall When Faced With That Reality

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As the COVID19 pandemic continues, it’s brought out the different sides of people directly and indirectly in my life. I continue to be impressed by the many folks who fearfully, yet generously, show up to work at the grocery stores, the hospitals, and the other businesses of service that we can’t live without and can’t be run remotely. I am equally surprised by those who had the opportunity to help and instead fled. Fear is powerful. It makes those who consider themselves generous selfish.

I’ve seen great efforts of humanity from handmade protective equipment to online hangouts bringing people who haven’t talked in years together. I’ve seen folks put on fitness, meditation, and medical school classes virtually—I’m amazed how much can be done over online video chat it a pinch.

I’ve also seen people lash out at people who are sick but not dying, in anger and fear. It is easy to blame those who are sick for their illness and label them as a threat but, like everything in life, it isn’t that simple. It’s worth remembering that pandemics are not the work of individuals; they are the work of collectives. What is more, viruses and other microbes are perfectly simple and wonderfully complex. Nothing made by humans can be quite as clever as they are, so no need to find human scapegoats to blame for a disease they could not have made.

The idea of not knowing if someone has an illness you can catch is scary. But, that’s the nature of many infectious diseases, not just COVID19. And while many of us born in America do not necessarily think of potentially deadly infectious diseases often, that is a luxury people in different parts of the world do not have. It helps give perspective to remember that millions of people die of infectious diarrhea and malaria, for example, each year. And their plight isn’t one the larger world community has committed to ending. It will go on…perhaps as long as humans exist.   

We are strained by social distancing today. Yet, we carry on because we have a sliver of hope that by limiting our interactions we can end COVID19. We believe that we can limit the number who die or get sick. As we hold on to these ideas, we should also remember that social distancing need not make us less compassionate for others. Protecting ourselves does not require that we compromise kindness. I would hope that we all see this time as an opportunity to discover creative ways to help those who are sick while also protecting those who aren’t yet. The infection count is not a numbers game of distant people we don’t know, it is happening right here, today, and to real people with families and a story. Just remember that those numbers you’re refreshing are humans. Don’t forget that, because if you do you just might become apathetic. We have a pandemic to end. It will take the actions of each of us to be successful. Stay engaged.