one of the many sophisticated diagnostic tools I employ during flu season

how to be a good doctor

think

care

be curious about both the science and humanity of medicine

accept uncertainty

know that you will not always get it right

forgive yourself

stages of grief, as applied to the doctor's scale

my desk is within earshot of our scale, so about 40 times a day, i am privy to patients' comments as they are weighed.  it dawned on me that most of the comments fell into one of the five stages of grief:

denial -- 'something is clearly wrong with your scale!'

anger -- 'i don't see why i have to get on this scale!'

bargaining -- 'i just weighed myself this morning, can't you use that measurement?'

depression --  no comment, just silence and maybe a sigh.

acceptance --  don't actually hear that one very often.

well, that would be more fun than sleep apnea

i was typing a note today and meant to type "patient reports occasionally waking abruptly gasping for breath" and instead typed "patient reports occasionally waking abruptly grasping for breast"

good thing i caught that before i hit the sign button.

i keep my best ideas to myself (or - it is best to keep my ideas to myself)

i have two very creative, entrepreneurial sisters.  one owns and operates a music school and one is an artist.  the music school sister has a really cool mural painted on one of the walls of the school.  on another wall she has chalkboard paint so the students can draw and doodle on it.  it looks awesome.

my other sister, the artist, is opening a needle felting studio.  she plans to have a large sliding barn door covered in felted wool that class participants can felt things on.  that will probably look really cool too.

being the troubled, jealous middle sister that i am, i want a cool wall too.  i run my own business.  i'm creative, damn it!

but here's where it all goes wrong.  when i think to myself, what kind of wall could i do in one of my exams rooms, this is what i come up with:  feet.  yes, feet.  everyday i examine lots of feet.  as soon as i request that the person take off their shoes and socks i hear, 'oh, but i have the ugliest feet in the world!'  so i think i should take a picture of everyone's feet and put them up on my wall and then we could see just how accurate these predictions of ugliness are.  and that will be my mural - i'll call it the ugliest feet in the world wall.  people will come from all over to see it.

somehow i don't think it will look as good as the music mural...

dulls the pain and tasty too

my patient was told they would be putting a cocktail in her knee during surgery so she won't have as much pain when she wakes up.  I'd want a bloody mary with olives, please.

the oath of maimonides

(author's note:  this post isn't funny and isn't entirely about medicine...)

you may have heard or read about this event two days ago -- a young man, sasha fleischman, was badly burned while asleep on a city bus after a fellow student set his skirt on fire.  sasha identifies himself as agender, neither male nor female, and occasionally wears skirts.  when i read about this my gut reaction was of course, horror.  how could someone do such a thing?  and in such a public and aggressive way?  and why does a boy in a skirt invoke such anger and hatred?

at the same time that my heart was sinking, it was also lifted up by the beauty and hopefulness of sasha's self-love and self-acceptance. that he loves himself enough to know that this is who he is, and that he accepts himself enough to openly express himself through his dress is a joyful and inspiring thing to me. but, as this shows us, the bravery of self-actualization sometimes requires incredible vulnerability.

so what does this have to do with medicine? well, events like this, intimate acts of hatred between one human being and another, make me think of the oath of maimonides.  maimonides was a twelfth century physician, astronomer and jewish philosopher.  similar to the hippocratic oath, maimonides' oath was a call to the physicians of his time to 'do the right thing.'   the part of the oath that i love the most is this:

     'may i never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.'

in my mind, i have adopted it as 'before and above all else, see the human being in the person in front of you' and i think of this every day in my medical life, usually right before i enter the exam room. it sounds simple enough, but it is so easy in my job to center myself on the illness, the chief complaint, the test results, the computer screen, and the dozens of other tasks i must attend to with each encounter, that  i need to make a conscious effort sometimes to center myself on the patient.  when i say that oath to myself, then i can relate to my patients as persons, as individuals with real suffering, not simply as a list of medical problems or test results.  when you do this, you open your heart to your patients, and i believe you become a more compassionate physician.  i am far from perfect at this.  ask any of my patients! i have my harried days when i want to close myself off from my patients' pain or suffering, when i want to just check all the boxes and move on, but i do try to hold this tenant in my mind with each person i see. (i'm getting bogged down in this paragraph but i think you're getting what i'm trying to say...)

so getting back to sasha -- i believe there is something in the oath of maimonides for all of us. an opportunity to see the fellow creature in front of us as a suffering human being.  not as a boy in a skirt, but simply as a person to whom we are intimately connected by our shared humanity. that is what maimonides asked of his fellow physicians then, and what i hope for sasha and all of us now.