Brave Enough To Be Bliss

be having, ultimately how you cared for them in their moment of need will have a far greater impact than how you treated them.

“At our core, we all just want someone to be there for us when we get scared. Sometimes, something as simple as holding a patient’s hand will have a far greater healing effect than all the medicine in the box.

“I can teach you anything as long as your heart is in it. This job will jade you quickly but if you care for your heart like you do your patient’s, you will never be wrong.

“We are blessed to be able to see people on their first, their worst, and sometimes their last day. It is one of the most sacred trusts and one that neither I, my partner, or my students ever take for granted.”

I admire you, Cory Buckner, and am so glad you are doing what you’re doing. Please keep spreading your perspective as it’s desperately needed in healthcare and our world. Keep up the great work!

“Life is short. Don’t squander the chance to be kind. Kindness requires only a smile or a gesture. Kindness is love in action. And love is everything.” Margaret B. Moss

In my career, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with physicians. I greatly admire the initial and ongoing sacrifices they make to do what they do.

Most physicians are perfectionists, which helped them get through all the years of education, typically 10-14 years after high school. They are getting their first “real” job in their early to mid -30s and most have more than $200,000 in student loan debt. There are pros and cons to being a doctor, but there are reasons why they make the high income they do; they’ve invested in their education, there’s a decade delay in beginning to earn their salaries, malpractice insurance premiums are extremely expensive, and their work schedule is intense and stressful, especially for those providing on-call emergency care. In 20+ years working in healthcare, I never knew of a physician who regularly played golf on workdays. In fact, it was tough to get many of them together even once a year for an appreciation golf tournament, even though that’s still a perception that exists. On September 8, 2022, at exactly midnight, I sent the following email to myself from bed. What if the medical community of physicians doesn’t want to readily acknowledge the connection between mind and body because it’s unpredictable, unable to be controlled, and because it would force them to be human and actually get to know their patients and perhaps hear a little bit about their lives and pain knowing it cannot be fixed by a pill or surgery. Instead, it would force them to discuss mental health therapy rather than physical or occupational therapy. Every physical health issue could be better tolerated with the help of mental health support, although there can also be an issue with long wait times to get into a mental health professional which can provide additional frustration for both physician and patient. What if when I thought I had urinary incontinence my body tried so hard to hold in the urine that it physically tried to hold in everything. At that time, I was overwhelmed with the thought of being incontinent and having to wear adult diapers for the rest of my life that it would make sense my body tried to help me by physically tensing up and trying to withhold what wasn’t supposed to go out without my knowledge. What if for a decade I had gone to every specialist I could think of to get help with something that couldn’t be helped physically? What if the physical therapist was on the right track with breathing but it just needed to go a step further and connect with the trauma that I had been through with all the surgical complications? What if it wasn’t the trauma of t he rape as one GI physician had in his mind, but it was actually the healthcare trauma I had been through that made it so much worse than it was already?

Sometimes the advice many physicians give patients is no clearer than just losing weight. There are some legitimate reasons behind that, but I think it’s really more related to fear or lack of understanding on the

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