Brave Enough To Be Bliss

both enjoying. It’s been such a blessing in my life and all it took was me going first and then her stepping up to meet me with her own vulnerability. Although not everyone needs to be vulnerable on social media, if she and I can put ourselves out there publicly, what could you do in your personal relationships to increase the level of vulnerability you show and create more deeply satisfying relationships with those you love? “We are alive for such a short blip in time, let’s max out on all of the experiences while we can. Joy, loss, failure, success, tragedy, and triumph. We get to experience all of it. Experiencing these things is the fullness of the human experience.” Ginger Rothhaas Over the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to get to know many physicians and, like all people, some are great to work with and some are difficult to work with. They’re humans and they have joy and pain and everything in between. I met Dr. Andy Schwartz in 2001 when he was a cardiothoracic surgeon at Shawnee Mission Medical Center. While we had more than 600 physicians on the Medical Staff, in my role as Vice President of Marketing, Planning & Business Development I got acquainted with many of them. In general, each physician specialty has a typical “personality” that can be expected. While there are exceptions to this on an individual basis, these traits are often what drew them to that particular specialty and help them succeed. Cardiothoracic surgeons like Dr. Schwartz can be arrogant, demanding and independent. While they appear to like themselves a lot, they can be difficult for others to warm up to. But if you are facing open heart surgery, you don’t mind knowing your surgeon believes in his ability even to the point of being cocky, fights for the best instruments or implants to complete your surgery, or demands perfection from his staff in the operating room. It takes guts to stop a heart that’s beating, even if not well, believing you are going to get it started again . Things don ’ t always go as planned and if that happens, it’ s all on them. Imagine being that surgeon with the personality characteristics I described above, but after you to tell that patient her heart is repaired and she just needs to tell it to beat again, the heart still doesn’t start and despite repeated efforts to get it started, it never does. She dies. Let that sink in. This patient who was your responsibility is lying on the operating room table dead. You feel you have failed as a surgeon, and you stand there for a moment and then you call the time of death. She came in with a beating heart that you stopped, and you repaired, and yet, she is dead. And now you immediately have to go out and tell her husband and children that she died. Only several hours ago, these people who dearly love this woman were telling her she had to hurry up and recover before Thanksgiving so she could make her secret recipe pumpkin pie. You know there will be no more pumpkin pies that taste just like hers. Instead, there will be tears and pain and grief today and for many days beyond Thanksgiving…and even though you didn’t technically do anything wrong, you feel like a failure because she is dead, and nothing is going to bring her back. Nothing will be the same for that family ever again. Imagine when you go out and tell the family, they are not only in shock, but the husband is immediately angry and blames you . She was supposed to be OK. She was supposed to recover. Of course, there was some risk, but you must have done something wrong. And now there are patients to see in the office who are also angry. They've been waiting because you tried to restart this woman’s heart for so long because you just couldn’t bear to let her go. You don’t even have time to process what just happened, because the office has called, paged, texted. There’s no time to grieve the loss of Take a moment and listen to the compelling operating room story behind this song. Danny Gokey - Tell Your Heart To Beat Again (Live) (youtube.com)

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