Goddess – Ena's worlds

Witness to suffering

As a doctor, a lot of the care that I provide has nothing to do with prescribing medications or performing procedures. Sure, they form a significant part of my training and my day to day work. However, there are also many times where all I can provide for the patients is my presence, to be a witness to their suffering and to create space for them to grieve and mourn.

This was a huge revelation to me in the earlier stages of training – recognizing that there are many things we can’t just “fix” in medicine, and that care doesn’t end with telling a patient “I am sorry, there is nothing we can do”. I never realized how difficult it is to be truly present to witness someone’s suffering until I had to do it myself. It is so easy to give into the temptation to comfort, or to give false hope or even mislead. At the beginning, I told myself that it is because I care deeply about the patients, and it was difficult for me to watch them suffer. However, the more I did this, the more I realized I was NOT helping these patients by quickly wrapping up their suffering in a neat package to replace it with something prettier – I could see how this made them feel confused and lost. Why then, was it so hard for me to change my behavior?

Problem solving engages the prefrontal cortex of our brain – the part that allows us to reason, filter and regulate our emotions. Being forced to turn away from problem solving therefore leaves us feeling exposed, out of control and yes – vulnerable. However, in turning away from problem solving, we can truly be present and focus entirely on the suffering of the individual in front of us. In psychiatry, this is called “holding space”. Having the space to grieve without feeling pressured to go into problem solving mode can be a deeply therapeutic experience that allows one to just “be” and not be judged.

Think about our daily lives – how often do we simply listen to our friends, family or significant others and be fully present to witness their experiences? As children, how many of us had the luxury of this experience when we tried to share difficult experiences with our parents?

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to have someone fully present to witness my suffering, to have an understanding of how this could help my patients. My mind shifted to when I pray or meditate at my altar. Sometimes, I am looking for answers – but more often than not, what I desire is to have the time to sit in my grief and to let it all out, and to have someone sit WITH me in my grief. The sheer presence of my goddesses and spirit guides had always comforted me in my darkest times, and this is what I could do for my patients when there is nothing else I could offer as a doctor. Simply being present in their suffering was a service I could provide in those dark moments.

Now, when I deliver bad news, I sit with them, quietly, with a tissue box in my hand. I stay present with their grief, and in doing so I hold space for them to process their suffering.

It is true that this is much harder with family and close friends – those who we consider part of ourselves and can make us feel particularly vulnerable when they share their suffering. Practice makes perfect and I am still working on it.

Angels in our lives

I was having my biannual review of competency today when my evaluator told me, “I am sure you are tired of people cheerleading you all the time but I just want to cheerlead you again, to keep up with your good work”.

I wish I could tell him how much his words meant to me. The thing is, at least in medicine where I work at, I do not get much cheerleading, if at all, for my successes. If anything, disclosing my research work or records of my other accomplishments have resulted in hostile behavior from supervisors and bias them to think that I am not invested in learning from them or that I think less of them because of my accomplishments. This is why I don’t offer up this information unless asked directly – even then, it is often met with, “Oh really? I guess you must be really bored here then”, or “Oh really? We need to make sure this becomes a good *learning opportunity* for you”.

This is a biproduct of an education system that thinks pointing out an individual’s flaws, instead of celebrating their accomplishments, is going to get them to learn more effectively. To this opinion, I would like to ask what evidence they are basing this on. Education theory 101 taught in teaching school states that for students who are internally motivated, strength-based teaching approaches work much better than criticism-based approaches. This is where the sandwich model of delivering feedback was developed, where teachers are coached to provide one constructive feedback in the middle of two positive feedbacks. Focusing only or mostly on short comings does NOT motivate a leaner to do better – it gets them to be comfortable with failing. One can call that developing resilience. Well, most residents would prefer to call it “learned helplessness”, which is one of the core dimensions of depression. If no matter what we do, all we can expect is criticism, then why should we try at all?

Of course, we are learners and there is MUCH we need to learn, and evaluations of those necessary skills make a lot of sense. However, evaluation for the sake of evaluation, not producing competent health care providers, discourages cheerleading and breeds and selects for educators who “get off” of criticizing learners to boost their own ego. The system that I am in even penalizes educators who give favorable evaluations to learners – someone please tell me how this makes sense. If we can’t count on our educators be our cheerleaders, in this harsh society where medicine and doctors are more demonized than ever, who can we depend on?

When I teach medical students, my first priority is to make sure that they are treating patients in a safe way and if they can’t, that they feel comfortable enough to come tell me. My second job after that is to make sure their learning goals are met in the context of what field they want to specialize in. If their field of interest does not relate to my field at all, then I make it a priority to get them home in time so they have the time to devote to self care and studying for their area of interest. Evaluations that I provide are always strength based, because more often than not, medical students are more than WELL AWARE of their short comings. I learned to do this from the many wonderful teachers I met in my life who have done this for me. My very own cheerleaders that taught me the joy of cheerleading for others and how rewarding that experience can be.

Cheerleading is not something to be taken for granted – many people, even in education, are not capable of this or know what it feels like. While this post was largely a rant of my frustrations towards the education system that I am in, I also wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude for the cheerleaders in my life – my husband, mentors, and of course my goddesses and spirit guides. May their lives be three fold as blessed as the light they have shone in my life.

Until it happens to you

No, this blog post is not about Lady Gaga’s timeless song, “Til it happens to you”, although I would encourage any soul to check it out.

I feel that we, as humans, are motivated by our survival instincts to engage in victim blaming. Aligning or identifying with the victim feels like admitting our own vulnerability, because if the victim was “victimized”, and we are like the victim, then we are also vulnerable to being victimized.

To cope with this fear, one points out the victim’s flaws, whether it be regarding the victim’s character or behavior, trying to make the victim as unappealing of a human being as possible, one who we can’t possibly be similar to. In short, we dehumanize the victim so that we can feel safe.

I have certainly been guilty of this myself. I did not come from money or anything special, really, and my academic achievements used to be the only thing that made me stand out from the herd and gave me a sense of belonging and identity. Because of this, I had absolute faith in my ability to tolerate whatever hardship my research or academic career otherwise would throw at me. Unconsciously, I was TERRIFIED of ever admitting that I could face a situation that I couldn’t tolerate in academia. Therefore, when I heard about other trainees leave their abusive supervisors, I used to immediately go into victim blaming mode for my own survival, thinking that the abused student/ trainee was “weak”, “useless”, and probably deserved the bad treatment anyway.

If you read my previous blogs, you will know that the goddess eventually decided to teach me a lesson and gave me an obstacle that I could not overcome. I, for once, could not tolerate the abuse that was thrown at me and had to leave that position, the learning opportunities that came with it, and the possibility of a good evaluation in that rotation. When I shared this story with my colleagues, some were sympathetic and offered me words of support and advice. Others however, looked at me with judgmental eyes veiled by fear, almost wanting to scream at me “You deserved what happened to you, that would NEVER happen to a normal resident”. They interrogated me to find out what I had done wrong to deserve this outcome, so that they could be reassured that it was my fault, and that it would never happen to them. It did not escape me that I had also felt the same urge to judge when other colleagues would confide their struggles to me – I was being taught an important lesson that would stay with me forever.

My work in providing compassionate care to my patients as a physician DEPENDS on my ability to identify with them. If a patient with an extensive substance use history walks in the door with yet another overdose – I cannot hope to provide empathy and support that the patient needs in that moment unless I feel a kinship with them. The patient was likely living in highly marginalized conditions with multiple social stressors – the substance use was a way of coping when they had no other resources. I have also been at the end of my rope at the mercy of strangers for my next meal or a roof over my head. This person could be my brother, sister, mother, father, or even me.

What do I do though, when that survival instinct to feel safe is so deeply engrained into my biology? This is when I dig into my identity as a witch and ask for the help of my goddesses and spirit guides – to allow me to transcend beyond my human nature to recognize that we are all children of mother Gaia. Spiritual leaders in witchcraft and other paths often come from dark pasts – I deeply believe that this is no mistake. I believe that these individuals are angels sent to earth to learn a lesson, so that they can alchemize their suffering into healing light.

At the end, brothers and sisters, we are ALL human. We are ALL vulnerable to the same misfortunes and follies, to the same depths of sorrow and loss. This was one of the many lessons the goddess had planned for me when I came to this earth, and I hope to share it with you today.

Have a blessed new moon, child of Gaia. I embrace you.

Embracing the Other

Working in a hospital as a doctor is an interesting experience because while you are working on a team, you are often the only doctor on the floor, especially if it is overnight and you are on call.

The responsibility of being the only doctor feels HUGE the first few nights any resident does call by themselves, and it never really goes away as staff physicians often tell me. Once in awhile, a physician from a different specialty will work on the floor with you as a part of a “buddy system” to be an extra pair of hands on the floor, which is always greatly appreciated. The downside of being that “off specialty” doc is that they are often othered by the team, seen as less competent, and treated as such as well.

I was having yet another overnight shift at the ED where my staff happened to be this off specialty doc. However, he had been working as a ED physician for many years and considered himself (perhaps accurately) a specialist in the area. Unfortunately, the night went very poorly for him. Several resuscitation cases came in that he could not manage on his own – he had to call the help of another ED doc but alas, it was not enough to save the patients. I was not involved in those cases so I did not know of the details of what happened in that resuscitation room.

The rest of the night marched on with a heavy mood. I could hear whispers from all corners of the hospital talking about how these cases did not go as they should have, that another physician would have been able to save them. It was hard to control myself from not thinking what they were thinking. Would the outcomes have been different had it been a different doctor? Someone who was trained in ED from residency?

When it came time to review some of the patients with this physician, I could see the worn and defeated look on his face. As soon as I started presenting, he abruptly cut me off and without giving me a chance to finish, he started to ask basic questions, insinuating that I basically did not know what I was doing. When I showed him my documentation proving that the information was all there, he LOUDLY told me that residents are not to be trusted and that because of this, I must follow a way of presenting as per his preferred style to demonstrate that I “am not making stuff up”. I was dumbfounded by this experience. Immediately my mind went to what I was going to put on this supervisor’s evaluation for treating his residents this way. Then, the goddess whispered in my ear, “no, Embrace the Other”.

He was alone in this entire ED, managing a highly acute floor by himself in a truly difficult night. He was further othered by the staff here due to the failed resuscitation cases. I imagined what I would have felt in his shoes, and my heart immediately broke for him. The thing is many resuscitation cases are not “salvageable” when they come into the hospital. Patients often have the wrong idea of what a resuscitation is like from TV shows – miraculous recovery is extremely rare. Even if a person’s heart is to start beating again, the chance of them regaining much of their baseline level of functioning is even smaller. With his years of experience working at the ED, I am sure he knew this too, and so did the rest of the ED team who were judging him. However, amidst all this background information, his identity as the “other” is what shifted their view into judgement and criticism instead of understanding and empathy. His harsh criticism of my work, increasing his voice so that everyone else could hear, was probably an unconscious effort on his part to re-exert his power and sense of control on this floor. Yes, it came at my expense, but what I had to endure was far less than his suffering.

Gritting my teeth and controlling my breath, I told him “Thank you so much for teaching me this, it is very helpful.” He nodded and sent me on my way to see more patients. At the end of the night, when he was doing my evaluation, he said “I was so glad you were here, it would have been a rotten night without you”. It was in this moment when the teaching of the goddess became apparent. Had I not shown understanding and patience in that moment, I would have pushed him further into the darkness. In choosing to set my ego aside to embrace the Other when nobody would, I accompanied another physician, another human being, in his journey from darkness back to the world of light.