Medicine Is

Medicine is beautiful, agonizing, frustrating, soul-filling, heartbreaking

Medicine is pulling up a chair next to your bedside, sitting down and leveling with you, eyeball to eyeball, human to human

Medicine is taking a deep breath before my agenda spews out before me bouldozering my way through checklist item after checklist item

Medicine is being gentle in the words I use to describe a ct scan of a belly chalk full of cancer

How old are you? A doctor you say? That couldn’t be

Medicine is taking a deep breath, biting my tongue, laughing it off, moving forward preserving grace and dignity for the hurting human laying before me

Where’s my doctor, nurse?

Medicine is listening, making space, hearing about the 3000 lb bull and looking at pictures of grandchildren even though your 6 unwritten notes, 7 unanswered pages and the 2 other patients waiting to be seen are sending your sympathetics into hyperdrive, telling you to make it snappy and say adios

Well you’re a pretty little thing

Medicine is the gentle touch of a hand resting on a shoulder before assaulting your chest with stethoscopes and hands unbuttoning your gown

Thank you sweetie

Medicine is making the phone call to someone’s beloved day after day after day with no real new news other than your wife is dying from her alcohol use and her brain is so damaged that she doesn’t have any insight into her disease and has no ability to make new memories

You sure remind me of my granddaughter

Medicine is unfolding every unturned stone instead of blindly trusting in another’s work

You look like you’re about 12 years old!

Medicine is teamwork, medicine is supporting and lifting up those around us, encouraging, breathing life into, not avoidance or animosity or talking down about

Medicine is making space for you to share with me that your dying wish is to speak with your only daughter whom you haven’t had contact with for 30 years and to tell the only woman you’ve ever truly loved that you’ve never stopped loving her even though you haven’t spoke since you were 25 

Medicine is bringing you a pb&j and a milk carton at the nurse shift change so that it doesn’t get forgotten

Medicine is calling the specialist who I have had consistently negative interactions with to advocate for you, to answer the questions that no one seems to be eager to address

Medicine is deep breathing, it’s intentionality, rigorous integrity

Good medicine is not rushing to blurt out your suspicion, it’s sitting in the waiting and embracing the mystery and complexity that each unique individual unfolds

It’s not putting complex, dynamic, unique people into our cookie cut black and white boxes

Good medicine is

Hard

Collaborative

Creative

Dedicated

Honest 

&

Rare