Personal self-care is an important strategy for every physician. On one recent vacation, thoughts of the challenges facing my patients intruded despite all of my attempts to “escape.” I reflected that perhaps even the most comprehensive medical education cannot fully impart the means to clear the lingering images of suffering patients from our minds. When the skill of empathy is taught to medical students, it is contrasted with sympathy. We teach that empathy allows us to maintain a distance that ultimately facilitates the therapeutic agenda. Yet even an experienced physician skilled in this principle might falter while walking on a beach at dawn and far from home.
Away time
This summer
I’ve traveled miles
Plane bus ferry and car
Away time
A physician’s
(Merited) absence
Walk with me along this beach
Ocean tide soon to be high
(It says so on a sign where stones give way to sand)
Will elide my footprints
So vigorously planted
I’ll return with the dawn
To press my soles and toes
Into the grains again
But what of those souls I’ve left behind
(Or who have left me?)
Thoughts
Ebbing and flowing
Considering not my own
Footprints of my patients on the planet
So briefly outlined
Invariably each will fill
Effaced
In the relentless push/pull of the tide
In a passing storm
Disease lapping at the bulwark
I’ve never known one patient
Willingly washed away
Except when finally swept away
Seeking peace
I haven’t left them behind
Weeks leading to this vacation no different
Each limned in my mind
To punctuate my leave-taking
This one
Another
Then another so many
Diagnoses
Since humanity’s beginning
Innumerable
As the particles at my feet
Or the tears they have/I shed
This morning
I behold an ocean of salt tears
What do patients think
We think about
Away time
Is never truly away
Shell to my ear
Susurration of the sea
Hear their voices in the sibilance
Sh ... sh ... sh ...
Time makes
Supplicants of us all
Please
Allow us to stay
A little longer
Waves pounding crashing
A particular wind in that sound
Is there mockery in that
Assertive roar
Our sophistication
Transient/lost
No match for
What endures beneath
Archaea
I’m not the first poet
Nor will be the last
Here
Expounding/expanding on this
Existential theme
What I realize
(And our patients will never know)
What they don’t teach in medical school
Is
How to really take a vacation
Footnotes
Competing interests
None declared
- Copyright© the College of Family Physicians of Canada