THE PATIENT WHO CHANGED MY LIFE A Wising Up Web Anthology
PART III: BURNOUT PART IV: COMPETENCE & COMPASSION PART V: CHANGING PLACES
PART III: BURNOUT The
stories in the section,
Burnout, are, in their own ways, even more concerned with boundaries
than the
stories in the preceding section. What happens to our capacity to care
when,
for self-preservation, we reject permeability and respond to those we
interact
with from a position of radical, irreconcilable otherness - from social
power
(and powerlessness) that knows itself only as exhaustion? Nina Gaby's
meditation,
The Inventories We Keep, unsentimentally tallies up what drive
people out of
nursing, and what, beyond sheer necessity,pulls
them, in good faith, back in. Evelyn Sharenov's essay
powerfully describes the poignant and ultimately exhausting demands that
a
borderline makes on all who care for and about her.
PART IV: COMPETENCE & COMPASSION The stories in
Competence &
Compassion, both written by physicians, describe different sides of the
tension
many physicians feel between the need to meet the rigorous professional
demand
for technical competence and the core human demand, the social bond of medicine, to provide genuine
compassion. In
the final section, both a nurse and a physician explore the experience
of
changing places in the healthcare system, either through illness of
intimate
loss. Robert Sticca's memoir, This Guy Might Make It,
dramatically describes
the exhilaration and anxiety of successfully facing one's first surgical
crisis
and establishing one's professional credibility. In a more meditative
vein,
Matthew Smith explores the inner re-evaluation that follows having a
patient
tell you that competence may not be enough and medical circumstances
that
reinforce this point: "As I pondered our initial encounter from her
perspective I began to wonder if in the midst of a busy practice I had
somehow
lost something."
PART V: CHANGING PLACES In the final
section, both a nurse and a
physician explore the experience of changing places in the healthcare
system,
either through illness of intimate loss. David Page in Burr Holes in
the Heart
writes about the experience of medical catastrophe and the pain of
experiencing
it from both sides. Paula Sergi's narrator plays with liberating
anonymity of a
patient satisfaction survey and the far less liberating necessity to
begin
seeing oneself in a new role, that of patient.
