Pain

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As a doctor, I can write down symptoms, I can prescribe tests and medicines. But what matters to me most is when I’m given the opportunity to meet pain, to address pain, and to allow pain to melt into love. My commitment as a physician is to show up as that love, deeply enough that it can allow pain to be transformed.

Oh, the pain I have seen.

I met a man who had survived the atrocities in Syria. He spoke of the kaleidoscope of trauma his family, his friends, and he himself had endured. I found found myself standing helplessly at the threshold of the world he has known: an endless flood of images of violence and suffering.

I was overtaken with a sadness that has no name, a deep nausea.

Oh, the pain I have seen. How can we bear it?

For many years I worked as a paramedic, sometimes the first to arrive at the scene when someone had been shot in the street.