Compassion

One of my three new years resolutions this year was to blog weekly. Well...we see how well that's going. Great.
But I'm finally opening up this dusty blog of mine and digging deep to find an interesting tale to tell. There have been many hilarious, challenging, disappointing, and exhilarating things that have happened in the past 6 months. But I guess I'll just write what I'm thinking about tonight. And maybe that will spur me on to live up to that resolution this year.
I've been thinking a lot about compassion lately. First of all, what does it mean? So I googled it. "Compassion is a human emotion prompted by the pain of others"... "More vigorous than empathy, the feeling commonly gives rise to an active desire to alleviate another's suffering"... "Do to others what you would have them do to you"... "The English noun, meaning to suffer together with". I've seen this word lived out in front of my eyes since I was born. My mother and father are two of the most compassionate physicians I have met. They would truly, honestly, rather a patient see wellness in their own life than see uninterrupted sleep or time for hobbies in their own. My childhood was spent watching my general surgeon mother tirelessly return pages to the hospital nursing staff about the needs of her patients. And I remember sitting at the dinner table, watching her every move as she would repeatedly get up and go to the phone to patiently answer questions, order medications, or pack up her purse and grab her keys once more to return to the hospital to give her time, her life, to one more hurting patient. And that is what I wanted to be. I'd often ride along beside my parents and jump out of the car and scamper along beside them into the ER and into the OR and wish and hope that maybe someday I could have the knowledge to help these hurting people as much as they were able to.
I proceeded to apply for medical school to make this hope a reality. And in my application for school I wrote of "compassion". I naively tossed around the term, making bold statements about my own character, that I saw myself as a compassionate person, with the potential to show service to my patients and colleagues during my career as a physician.
And now I am seven months into a surgical internship and I will tell you what I have learned. The most important thing I have learned. It is not how to tie a perfect surgical knot or how to resuscitate a patient in cardiac arrest. The most important thing I have learned is that I stupidly assumed that I had the required compassion to be a physician of kindness and healing. I'm currently working as an intern on the vascular surgery service. Basically what this means is that I care for the dying extremities of the people of the Bronx. At 5:30am today I unwrapped a gauze dressing from the foot of a morbidly obese diabetic man. I stooped down at the foot of his bed and removed the last layer of yellow tinged material and immediately breathed in the wretched stench of necrotic death. Half of his elephant sized foot had been amputated previously and the remaining half was bubbling was gaseous green pus. I followed the instructions of my chief resident, removing the dead skin, applying antibiotic ointment and gauze dressing once again. And with every layer I wrapped I became more angry. I began listing in my mind all the horrible, unfortunate things happening in my life at that exact moment. Why should I be subjected to this dead stench? Why should I have to be here at this ungodly hour? Why should I have to miss my family and friends so much? And all this for a patient who will almost certainly call me to his bed side in the middle of tonight to complain about his pain and refuse to be stuck one more time for the blood draws I will likely demand to obtain.
And tonight I'm thinking about these thoughts of mine. And I am embarrassed to say these are honest and true. Is this compassion? Is this the medicine I desired and delighted in? Is this the physician I wanted to become? Is this the treatment I would want "done unto myself"? Certainly not. I am embarrassed that I had assumed I had the compassion this profession required. But my eyes have been opened and I demand more of myself. I realize today that becoming a surgeon will require much more than learning to tie knots, it will require dying to my own desires in order to "suffer together with" my patients. It will require more of me. I will begin working on this. And praying for this.