I thought the most important part of practicing medicine was fixing our patients...until I became one.
"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept."—Angela Davis
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All I needed to do was touch his finger and then my nose. I failed the first two times, but this time, I would focus and succeed. Nope. My body had betrayed me again and I missed his finger and my nose for the third time. The neurology resident scribbled something in his small notepad, thanked me for my time and left the room. That evening, as I lay on the stretcher in the emergency room, it felt like the white walls were slowly closing in on me. Although I had worked in numerous emergency rooms over the prior 16 years, in the US and abroad, none had ever felt this scary.
The twelve hours before arriving at the emergency room felt like a whirlwind. I woke up with nausea and vertigo, a condition where the room feels like it is spinning. I had experienced this for a few days, hoping it would disappear, but now it was unrelenting. I called to make an appointment at my primary care doctor’s office and drove there myself (a horrible and dangerous decision). I was found to have an abnormal neurological exam, referred to a local neurologist, and forced to call my parents so they could drive me to that office. When we arrived, I had resorted to grabbing the walls to keep me upright as we walked to the office.
I was sitting on the exam table when the neurologist walked in. She asked me to stand up to examine me. I confidently stepped down from the table and then immediately felt my legs buckle. The neurologist and my father caught me before I hit the floor and quickly helped me back on the table. She proceeded to do the rest of the neurological exam, an exam that I had performed on so many of my patients. Given the parts of the exam I failed, I had identified that there was something wrong with my cerebellum, the area of the brain responsible for coordinating movement, balance, and posture.
My parents and I were instructed to go immediately to the emergency room. I still couldn’t fully comprehend that I needed to be taken out of the car in a wheelchair. The global health doctor who traveled constantly was now unable to walk.
As I sat in the emergency room, I could feel tears welling up, but I was determined not to let them fall. Instead of feeling the fear, anger and grief that any normal human being would understandably feel at that moment, I took out my work computer. Yes, I had my computer. Not being able to walk did not mean I couldn’t do some research. However, after 5 minutes of looking at the computer screen, the dizziness worsened. I tried to push through, adamant about finding the diagnosis that could explain my symptoms. A few minutes later, I was forced to stop. I realized this would be the one time in my medical career that fatigue & exhaustion would win.
I would have to do the unthinkable- sit in this hospital room and do nothing except feel my feelings.
As physicians, we are trained to fix, not feel. We are often encouraged to suppress our feelings because they can interfere with the objective decision-making that is critical for ensuring we are making the right choices to serve our patients.
For the majority of my medical career, I followed this training. I cared for my patients, demonstrating the right amount of sympathy but keeping an emotional distance. This looked like saying the right words but not truly trying to understand the pain that a mother felt when I told her that her 2-year-old son was autistic. This looked like sensitively informing a father that his 18-month-old daughter’s labs were indicative of leukemia but not sitting down in silence to provide comfort.
I thought my patients were getting what they needed from me until I experienced what it was like to lie down in a gown on a stretcher instead of standing beside it with my white coat.
I knew that the traditional practice of medicine was extremely hierarchical and I had always tried to employ shared decision-making and empathetic communication. However, once I sat in the role of patient, I realized how difficult it was as a patient to feel that you were an equal partner in your care, even with the most well-intentioned clinician.
During my hospitalization, I was given information in bite-size pieces, with long periods without updates, causing me to ruminate about the worst possible scenarios. The physicians and nurses had so many patients to see, that it was impossible for them to have the time to help me process what was happening. There would never be a time or an offer to share how scared I was that I would not walk again. No person would be available to help me deal with this fear that I may never be able to do the work that I had trained for.
If I’m honest, I felt like my doctors and nurses were doing their best to care for me but didn’t care about me. Since I was very familiar with their day-to-day responsibilities, I also knew that it wasn’t their fault. Caring for me was the work they were mandated to do; the work of caring about me would require much more time, energy, and attention, which the healthcare system doesn’t give us the capacity to provide.
There are too few clinicians, too many patients and too little time. So we're taught to just fix our patients because we aren't allowed to give them what they truly desire from us - time to connect and feel their emotions alongside them.
When the medical team finally identified that the cause of the brain lesion found in my right cerebellum was multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune neurological disorder, I was left to process this on my own.
No one had time to ask how I was feeling. No one had time to ask what my worries were. No one had time to help me think through how this would affect my family and identify solutions. Knowing how busy everyone was, I didn’t even entertain asking for that support. They had completed their job. They diagnosed me. They figured out a treatment and were giving it to me. They were fixing me. Managing my feelings, fears and worries would be up to me.
When I returned to practicing medicine after months of medical leave and physical rehab, I couldn't practice as I did before. I was no longer just seeing patients, but now I was seeing patients. I saw who they were. I saw the bigger issues that intersected with their health. I saw their body language and emotions that communicated their true feelings. This shift became a big problem for my workflow in our busy primary care practice. I worked too slowly because I needed to understand my patient’s story and their needs, which meant I was incapable of seeing patients in the 15 minutes that were allotted. While my patients knew that I would spend the time they needed, it meant sometimes waiting for over an hour, which was unfair to them.
When a mother revealed to me that she was being abused or a father disclosed that he just lost his job, my role in that exam room changed. I wasn’t there just to offer words of encouragement and move on. I was there as one of the only people they trusted to disclose this information to, and my job was to be with them, feel with them, and use that to guide the next action steps.
What I'm learning is that feeling our emotions as clinicians does not interfere with our work; it elevates our work. Providing clinical care while connecting emotionally with our patients requires more of us. It asks us to think deeper, be more present, and act beyond logic but with love.
When we don’t solely fixate on solving the specific problem but also focus on seeing the whole person, we move from caring for patients to actually caring about people. This fosters trust which must be present for true healing.
What has always perplexed me in how I was trained was that we ask our patients to disclose so much of themselves, while we are not required to share anything of ourselves. The expectation that this imbalance in vulnerability will foster deep patient-provider connections with our patients is laughable.
I remember when a mother of a 2-day-old newborn was in my room crying about her breastfeeding difficulties and how inadequate she felt. The physician I was before my diagnosis would have given her words of encouragement and went through solutions on how to breastfeed. However, at that moment, I felt her pain because four years prior, I had cried as my first-born daughter did not seem to be satisfied with my initial attempts at breastfeeding, and I was scared I was starving her.
So, I was vulnerable. I shared that I had the same experience and how my milk came in the following day. We hugged, and I felt so much lighter and so much more than a physician. I felt like a healer.
What would medicine have to look like if our job was to not just care for and fix our patients but to care about them and feel their emotions alongside them?
For me, it meant leaving my academic practice and building a network of community-based practices that allotted the time necessary to do this work and the support staff that could support a family not just within the practice but in their daily lives. This requires more time, more people and thus, more money. We have had to be extremely creative to make this work financially, but after four years and 1500 patients to date, it is working.
However, we all can’t create new healthcare spaces, nor should we have to. We must also change existing healthcare spaces. Those of us who have straddled the roles of patient and provider have a unique opportunity to be vocal about our experiences and leverage our credibility as clinicians to show how the current care model is breeding poor quality of care, inequitable health outcomes and failing our patients. This is especially true for those who don’t have access to health advocates, usually the patients who look like me.
We have work to do. More importantly, we have unlearning to do. I don’t believe that clinicians have to become patients to truly embody the emotional acumen to be effective healers. I believe we can share our stories and teach others. I also believe that healthcare administrators can play a role- by listening to their clinical staff and advocating for the resources they need to truly provide the care that patients deserve.
Now, don’t get me wrong, practicing medicine does require the facts; the labs, the imaging, and the procedures are absolutely critical.
However, if you ask me, the secret ingredient isn’t how much we do for people but how present we can be with them. It is in these extra moments that I have learned a small piece of information to finally figure out a diagnosis or have created the time to convince someone to move forward with treatment.
In these intentional moments, we have the time and space to remember why we do this work. That is usually just enough motivation to keep us going.
I’d love to know your experience with fixing patients vs. feeling with them.
Has this been something that has come up for you?
Do you feel constraints in how you can show up in healthcare?
What are your thoughts about how we have to approach practicing healthcare or just changing healthcare?
What questions do you have for me and other readers?
To peace & freedom for more Black girls in healthcare,
Omolara
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