dear future healer, have you ever heard of hungry bone syndrome? one parathyroid gland makes too much of its hormone, and this messenger rushes through the bloodstream, arriving at its skeletal destinations to leach nutrients from bones to the point of osteopenia. bringing the body back to balance can lead the bones to eat, eat, eat. they do not forget their deprivation.
i would be surprised if you found a clinician who would argue this basic recipe for pathophysiology: too much of a, too little of b, permits or inhibits the production of c or d or e or all three. this is how you make a disease.
what is the recipe for a healer? my training has taught me what it isn’t. i wonder what happens to our souls when taking the time to talk to our patients is trained out of us. do the deepest parts of ourselves hunger for slowness, stillness, loving? this morning i caught myself slowly backing away to the door as my patient made small talk about his children, cleverly deviating from my priorities for the conversation. despite having only two patients to round on this morning, at this stage in my training, i am proud of taking an entire hour to see them. yet even this is not enough when there are endless boxes to check check check that indicate, somehow, that i provided care. my patient has no checkboxes. he only has stories and smiles he wants to share, and have reciprocated.
dear future healer, this system will try to train the loving out of you. it will try to train the caring out of you. you might wake up one day and wonder when you arrived in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy - or you might realize the world she described was actually your own, cleverly disguised, as you listen to the chief resident of vascular surgery instruct you on how to survive the rotation and its unnecessarily lengthy fourteen hour days. (“buy several microwave dinners. put one in the microwave as soon as you are home. eat it before you go to bed. wake up and come back to work.”) dear future healer, you will come to the realization that the expectations in this field are harmful for you, and impair your ability to have compassion for others. you might think to yourself that the recipes for success provided by your superiors are probably more likely to help you become a cancer patient than a doctor. you might start to wonder what being a doctor really means, in the sick care system we have created today. are we drug dealers? perhaps a better title would be: prescriber?
you might wonder to yourself why we have such clearly delineated paths in our textbooks that explain the consequences of imbalance in each organ system, yet ignore the glaring imbalances in our own lives as we learn and train. i wonder what happens to our bodies that endure chronic deprivation of sleep, of sunlight, of slow hours spent with the ones we love. i know our bodies don’t forget.
