Thank You Healthcare
Where we you last Friday? At 10:14pm, I was watching my oldest daughter, enveloped in medical sensors, being wheeled along a fluorescent hallway. We paused at a set of enormous double doors — my last moment to see her before the anesthesiologist ushered her into oblivion.
Her face was tight with pain and eyes full in nervous anticipation. A lanky ER doc had just ordered the rush surgery and there was little time to adjust to the disorienting new reality.
“I’m scared daddy. I’m scared I won’t wake up”.
As a father, what do you say to that? What do you say when you want so badly to comfort her with a vacuous promise of safety? What do you say when the truth is that you are as scared as she is, and of the very same thing?
Then I collapsed onto the answer.
“It’s just like when you go to bed. You do that every night and everything’s ok in the morning, right?”
In that moment, you have to be strong. There is enough fear already. It’s not you that matters right now. Nothing else matters but seeing your child emerge from those foreboding doors.
Healthcare has become a powerful wedge for politicians to divide us as a nation. Obscured by the vitriol, we have chosen sides and lost our sight of the people doing the work. Sometimes we forget that behind the zingers and gotchas, there are human beings. People with families, lives and ambitions just like you and me.
We complain about the cost.
We complain about the service.
We complain about the hospital food.
Amidst the din, they do the work.
To most of us, these complaints are thankfully detached from our daily lives. In cases where we do collide with the medical system, the moments tend to be ephemeral, and a return to our daily concerns ensues in short order.
Not so for the folks living in the system. They are the ones most affected, yet least considered. Providing care is a dance where the connection between the patient and caregiver is disrupted at every turn by safety standards and regulation animated into obstruction. A patchwork artifice of bar codes, digital record keeping, and rubber gloves, conspiring without malice, to disrupt human contact. Yet despite the hostile environment, doctors and nurses perform this ballet elegantly, every day.
There is a humanity to the job and a dignity writ large in this improvised choreography. Like any great art, it has deep emotional roots. And as this is life, a harsh finality exists as well. Some make it and others do not.
In one room a family is being shredded as they struggle to take in the news of intractable cancer or a lost loved one. In another, a tearful release of emotion with the good news that a surgery went well. In the past week, I was in both rooms for different family members.
A caregiver lives that life moment to moment. The contribution they make to the world is immense, not to mention the gift they gave to me personally this week.
My daughter is ok.
This past week, countless nurses, doctors and hospital staff came to our aid. The care we received was nothing short of spectacular. Without them, my daughter would be gone, and my life, and the lives of our friends and family, would be immeasurably less.
Every time I see my daughter I can’t help but be reminded of the chain of people who made her recovery not only possible, but successful. We live in amazing times and are the beneficiaries of medical advancements thought impossible a few short years ago. The pursuit of compassion through scientific truth is powerful indeed.
Yes, the system is flawed, but it’s also wonderful. In the storm of negativity that surrounds healthcare, a heartfelt thank you to those who make the gears turn. From the research lab to the hospice bedside, know your efforts to make this often difficult journey just a bit easier for all of us is appreciated and worth it.
