Happy Wednesday!
I’m back after a one-week hiatus. In the two weeks since my last update,
photo by Martin Bayer
Since the days of my medical training, I have been good at setting and holding professional boundaries with my patients. It’s possible to have both empathy and limits. As a consulting physician, I struggled much more with setting boundaries with my colleagues.
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Once, when I was a brand-new attending physician, it was my turn to see patients at Mainland Hospital. This was the less busy hospital for our practice, and the one closer to my home. One afternoon, I was able to get home early, and I was running around in the back yard with my three-year-old son. My pager went off; it was a stat consult. (more…)
When I first came to work for Atlantic City Medical Center in 1994, I learned of an annual conference to bring humanities into the training of the Internal Medicine residents. Victor Bressler, MD, who championed these events, called them “Bringing Caregivers Closer.” He was ahead of his time.
This was long before Rita Charon, MD founded the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia. There was not a lot of enthusiasm for these events from the Residency Director at that time. Nor were they well received by many of the residents who saw this conference as a needless interruption of their clinical training. The larger community, though, was impressed and gave these events high marks. (more…)
This past weekend, I took a poetry workshop through SCOSA – The Stockton Center on Successful Aging. They have a Tour of Poetry every second Saturday from 11am-1pm at the Otto Bruyns Library in Northfield. This was my first time attending.
I had been asked to lead the group in October, and I wanted to experience it as a participant first. Emari DiGiorgio, who coordinates these workshops, was facilitating. She asked us to introduce ourselves by using a metaphor for poetry in our lives.
The idea of making connections has come up again and again in my writing recently, so my metaphor for poetry was the synapses between neurons in my nervous system. In my physician life, the metaphor that came up was the comparison of my white doctor coat to the training wheels of a bicycle.
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I recently listened to a TED talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high) about his concept of Flow. He defines Flow as the state where one is so engaged that everything else, including bodily sensation, ceases to exist. In his theory, this state occurs when a person is both highly talented and highly challenged.
From this TED talk, I got an insight about myself, about why I had taken on a new challenge. The talk was recommended to me by a book coach who was explaining why first-time authors can get frustrated. First-time book writers are highly challenged. There is a lot involved in writing a book. But they are not yet highly skilled; they don’t have experience. They end up in the Anxiety zone. See a chart of the zones below.
Today, my yoga teacher talked to us about beginner’s mind. She encouraged us to treat each yoga pose as if it were the first time we had ever done it. “Start with the basics, build each pose from the foundation up,” she said.
She meant it literally, as when we set up for trikonasana (triangle pose). She meant it figuratively, as a way to set up new projects. So, here are my basics, my foundation. Healers Write, Writers Heal. The connecting thread is my writing process. (more…)
Today marks the first installment of a new schedule for my blog posts and newsletter. Drafting each post on Tuesday afternoon (cue the Moody Blues) fits better into the flow of my week. Writing and publishing on the weekend was hampering the momentum of writing my memoir.
This decision was not entirely intentional. Last Sunday, when I should have been composing a blog post, I made the choice to finish the novel I was reading. Normally, I am the queen of powering through when something needs to be done.
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In a couple of weeks, I will begin a new learning curve in my medical career, even as I am slowing down. I will be working part-time in a Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Clinic, offering medication-assisted treatment in an intensive outpatient setting which includes group and individual counseling. In my training for this role, I have learned a lot about the neurobiology of addiction.
Credit: Washington University-University of Minnesota Human Connectome Project Consortium
One of the things I’ve learned is that, in the natural course of the illness, relapse is an expected phase. The stigma and judgment attached to relapse, though, are immense. If someone with diabetes or asthma or high blood pressure has a relapse after being well controlled, there is much less of a tendency to blame the patient. (more…)
This week, I found a quote from Toni Morrison that helped me. The quote was in one of the many articles I read in the New York Times after her death. Here’s a snippet from the Op-Ed written by Roxane Gay that includes the quote.
In a conversation with Hilton Als for a profile in “The New Yorker,” Ms. Morrison said: “I can accept the labels because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”
This quote reached me at the right time in my self-doubt as I write the opening for my memoir. I know more and I’ve experienced more than most of my readers. Even among my peers, my experiences have been different. I must trust that my experience is not a shallow place, but a rich place to write from. (more…)
Last week, I wrote about the external obstacles to my writing. This week, I hit internal obstacles: resistance and procrastination. These feel worse to me. I feel defeated when I allow myself to be undermined by my anxieties.
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Yet, I am proud when I am not permanently derailed, when I can get back on track and find my way forward again. Then, I feel better, balanced, and equanimous. I regret the wasted time, but I do what I can with the time that’s left before my next deadline. (more…)