Medicine and Mothering on the Front Lines of COVID-19

Two weeks ago I picked my kindergartener up from after-school basketball on a routine weekday afternoon. He bounded up to me, backpack in hand and asked, “Mom, do you know about coronavirus?” His teachers had discussed the viral outbreak and the need for good hand-washing skills. My budding epidemiologist went on to explain how the virus spread from bats to another animal to a human to another human to even more humans and so on. I tucked him into bed that night, marveling at his teacher’s skill in stressing hygiene and explaining the novel virus to a group of 6-year-olds.

Of course now coronavirus, or COVID-19, is all anyone is talking about, reading about. Coronavirus has uprooted my personal and professional life. As a family medicine physician working in Seattle, and as a mom to three young children, COVID-19 has consumed my day-to-day activities and workplace. As a primary care clinician and parent at a U.S. epicenter of the outbreak, there is no other word for home or work right now than upheaval.

I am also a writer, a creator of art. But I have struggled to find the time and emotional space to articulate and explore all the layered questions this crisis has presented to me—as a physician, as a mother to young children, as a creative being in this world. Fragments of essays, lines of poems, pour out of me as I wake with anxiety in the middle of the night, as I run around a deserted Seattle park, as my children beg to gather with their friends, as I discharge a clinic patient who pauses as she exits the exam room: “Thank you for being a doctor.”

As a participant of Harvard Medical School’s inaugural Media & Medicine program, I’ve recently been trained in writing Op-Eds for the public, in discerning misinformation and disinformation in the media about healthcare issues, in thinking creatively about how we can use podcasting or plays or poems to tell stories that make a difference to important public health topics. My classmates and I, healthcare professionals from all over the world whose projects focus on varied themes from mental health to vulnerable populations, from physician burnout to cancer awareness, suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, sharing stories from our respective locations worldwide.

My work right now, though, is focused here, on my community: the people I hold most dear and the place I grew up in, I trained in, I live. My colleagues and community are at the forefront of this pandemic. I feel the rising sense of fear, the wave of overwhelm, the steady thrum of kindness.

For now, I offer this. Anyone who attended medical school with me knows I like to make lists. I approach a seemingly insurmountable task by compiling, organizing, and splitting it up into manageable components. Over the last two weeks, as local healthcare systems faced rapidly changing recommendations, confusion about suggested protocols, differing messages on testing capability, questions about adequate protection and supplies, as schools closed and family schedules were upended, I gathered information. Here is my contribution, my list of reliable resources and information for the worried, weary, and hopeful among you.

Despite my own swirling anxieties, I’m grateful for the work I’m trained to do, in medicine and in the humanities. I’m thankful for my colleagues—every aspect of the health care team—who are committed to serving our community’s most vulnerable, and each other, through an uncertain time. I’m bolstered by the parents sharing resources and tips about how best to support our children through unprecedented upheaval. This, I know: we are distilled in a crisis to the best, or the worst, that is in us. May we cling to the best, stand firm in sound science, look to compassion and art that sustains our souls, and encourage others to do the same.

Continue Reading

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Poetry in Primary Care

Returning from vacation as a primary care physician, as any physician, can be a daunting task. I wrote a flash essay for Pulse about the intense timeline of a typical family physician’s workday. You can imagine after being gone for a week the mountain of forms, test results, and emails that accumulate. Even when you have, as I do (many don’t), supportive partners who do their best to clean out as much of the inbox as possible, there’s a particular dread and pressure that occurs for the primary care physician returning to work. In medicine, everything is connected to a patient. A response delayed, an aberrancy missed, means damage—emotional or physical—to a very real person.

It was on such a day, back to work after a week of camping and s’mores and searching for sand dollars on a Washington coast beach with my family, that I stumbled upon a poem. Our clinic is set up with exam rooms jutting in from corridors that originate like tributaries from the hallways that line the perimeter of the building. Our offices dot the exterior hallway, windows overlooking the parking lot or other buildings in the business complex.

I was walking along this exterior hallway, brisk step between patients, stuffing my stethoscope back into my stiff white coat pocket, when I was struck by a nondescript sheet of paper tacked to the bulletin board just outside our nurses’ office. “Good Bones” caught my eye, made me pause mid-stride. There were patients to examine, lab results to respond to, phone calls to make, radiographs to interpret, but I stopped and turned and read the familiar lines.

I’ve followed poet Maggie Smith’s work for some time. I find poetry alluring and intimidating. I took Michelle Penaloza’s excellent poetry class at Hugo House last fall to overcome my perplexion, but found it would take much more investment to grasp all I wanted about the craft of poetry. Smith’s work is relatable; my contemporary, a mother, an artist, her words resonate and I instantly became a fan.

But to see her here, amidst my other vocation, my medical science workday of Pap smears and skin biopsies and asthma exacerbations, was foreign, a collision of worlds. Though I’ve written about and taught narrative medicine for several years now, though I’m aware of the benefits, to both the physician and patient, of integrating the humanities into the science of medicine, I’ve still found it challenging to be present with such art during the compressive restrictions of my primary care workday. So, Smith’s poem, tacked inconspicuously along a back hallway bulletin board, among graphs of clinic access and Medicare Five Star goals and HEDIS measures and Press Ganey patient satisfaction scores, was a welcome interruption, a surprising reminder, an appropriate intermission interjected into a hectic workday.

I asked around for several days after, attempting to determine who had posted the poem of maintaining hope amidst a broken world. Though I was told it had been up for weeks, maybe months, I never did find the culprit. That same week Glennon Doyle highlighted this very poem on her social media. For me a collision of two women I admire, I’ve never met, whose good works are far from medicine, far from my little corner of primary care amidst the jutting mountains, the emerald waters of the Pacific Northwest. But the lessons, the convictions, the challenge of poetry is relevant, maybe the most relevant to my interactions with patients, my titration of insulin regimens, my diagnoses of cancer, my prescribing of antidepressants, my listening to histories to evaluate an unintentional weight loss or a shortness of breath or an abdominal distention leaving a patient in excruciating pain.

Maybe an antidote to our broken healthcare system, the crux of narrative medicine, a balm for medical professionals suffering from compassion fatigue and secondary trauma and a system that increasingly squeezes the humanity out of of its providers, rests in the complex workings, the simple act of reading poetry. There’s instruction in the words, in the art of the line break, illumination of humanity in the universal themes presented. A reminder that at the heart of medicine we serve people, we are people, we are all in this together. Poetry infuses humanity back into this most human, most intimate of professions. Medicine is a science but it is also an art. For all of our sakes, maybe it’s time to embrace that pairing in an inspired, more hopeful way.

Writing Prompt: How do you talk with children about the difficult aspects of this world? Despite the brokenness observed and felt, do you try to sell your children on the world in the hopes that they would attempt to make it beautiful? Do you see poetry in medicine? Why or why not? Write for 10 minutes.

Continue Reading

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Dilemma Doctors Face

The spotlight has recently been on the opioid epidemic ravaging our country. As a primary care physician, I’m acutely aware of this issue and the challenges it poses to individuals, medical providers and the public health system as a whole. NPR’s The Takeaway recently did a program on understanding this crisis and approached it from many angles. Dr. Danielle Ofri wrote short a piece in Glamour magazine that gives a primary care physician’s perspective. In “The Dilemma Doctors Face,” Ofri notes that chronic pain is very real but differs from other chronic disease in that there is no definitive test or measurement for pain, it is subjective. “Chronic pain is real. It can ruin people’s lives. But the anvil of addiction and death can’t be ignored.” Ofri asserts that one challenge is that a system that doesn’t often pay for other ways of treating pain, such as physical therapy, acupuncture and massage, makes it easier for the medical provider to “just write a prescription.” Can you relate?

Writing Prompt: Have you or a loved one struggled with chronic pain? What were the challenges you faced when trying to find appropriate treatment? Have you or a loved one struggled with opioid addiction? What was the first sign that this had become an issue? If you prescribe opioid pain medications, how do you approach counseling patients about the risks and benefits of taking these medications? What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in having this discussion? Write for 10 minutes.

Continue Reading

Published: Timeline

I’ve tried to write a piece like Timeline several times. It’s simply a chronicle of my typical work day, but, in the past, I never was able to get it just right. It didn’t flow sufficiently, wasn’t a clear reflection of the exhaustion I feel at the end of the day. 

When I discovered Pulse’s “More Voices” column theme this month was “Stress and Burnout,” I felt compelled to finish this piece for submission. It was initially much longer, but I think the confines of the short word count (less than 400) was helpful in honing it to only the necessities. Previous versions of this essay were written in first person or third person. Second person, I’ve discovered, suits the purpose of the piece. My goal is to place the reader in the shoes of the primary care physician, feel the weight of her day, the exhaustion inherent in the constant churn of a general practitioner’s practice. I hope this piece provides a snapshot of a day-in-the-life of a family physician, and evokes a thoughtful reflection on the state of our health care system and the very real crisis of physician burnout. 

I’m grateful to Pulse for publishing Timeline and for their regular promotion of issues relevant to patients and medical providers through narrative medicine poetry and prose.

Writing prompt: When do you feel most stressed at work? When do you feel energized? Have you witnessed signs of burnout in your colleagues or your own medical provider? List your own timeline of a typical workday. How do you feel when you read it back? Write for 10 minutes. 

Continue Reading

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Heroism of Incremental Care

As a primary care physician myself, I found Atul Gawande’s new article “The Heroism of Incremental Care” encouraging and empowering. The New Yorker piece highlights the importance of longitudinal care between a patient and their primary care provider.

When Gawande visits a headache clinic in Massachusetts, the physician there tells him she starts by listening to the patient: “You ask them to tell the story of their headache and then you stay very quiet for a long time.” What have you found is the most important component of a physician-patient encounter? If you are a provider, do you feel you’re always able to listen to the patient’s full story? If you’re a patient, do you feel listened to when you see your doctor?

When Gawande visits the primary care clinic in Boston, he’s told the reason primary care is important to bettering patient health is due to the “relationship”. Do you agree? Have you had a relationship with a primary care provider that has invariably improved your health over the years? If you are a primary care provider, has this been your experience with patients?

Writing Prompt: Gawande writes of the clinic he visits: “At any given moment, someone there might be suturing a laceration, lancing an abscess, aspirating a gouty joint, biopsying a suspicious skin lesion, managing a bipolar-disorder crisis, assessing a geriatric patient who had taken a fall, placing an intrauterine contraceptive device, or stabilizing a patient who’d had an asthma attack.” Think about the last time you saw your primary care provider. Write about that visit in the present tense, then project a decade or two into the future. Imagine how that visit, and many others like it, might have made a difference to your health decades from now. Write for 10 minutes.

 

Continue Reading