Why do we do this work?
Why do we do this work?
For years I have asked my nursing and chaplain students: what is it that we do? Why do we do it? I get vague answers about “wanting to help” or “trying to heal people.” My questions remain: what is it that we do? Why do we do it? There are better paying jobs. Certainly all of you could have become MBA investment bankers and made a lot of money. You could have been park rangers. You could be research scientists working with rats. So: why are you here? What is it that you hope to achieve with patients?
Danger? Or Opportunity?
The old saw goes that in Chinese, “Crisis” is two characters. One means “Danger” – and the other, “Opportunity.” While it turns out that is not true in Chinese, often it is true in the case of the patient we see. Perhaps the manifesting symptoms are a problem that has been brewing, and needs attention. Or perhaps there is a sudden dangerous crisis, and is very bad luck indeed. The question is, just like after a surgery, what is the aftermath? Is there scar tissue that will cause ongoing problems? Or is it like a bone that, if set properly, heals better than before it was broken?
Navigating Toward Opportunity
As healers, we strive for the best of all possible outcomes. Ideally, people are very resilient: if they have hope, they endure and they overcome. However, when a person is in the thick of things and in pain, it seems the furthest thing away to think that they will have any benefit from this situation. This is especially true if there is a lasting loss of ability.
I believe our job in this is not to help the patient “feel better.” The crisis experience has the potential to reshape a person – both the healer and the healed. I believe our job is to help patients transcend their situation, and get as much as they can out of the new normal – even if that means helping that person to go down the path to a peaceful death, with as little terror or desperation as possible. Patients are surprised when we talk about resilience in the face of near-death experiences. You should have seen the surprised smile on a patient’s face when I reminded her that she had kicked the Angel of Death’s butt four times. More abstract to patients, but no less real is the maturing and the compassion that comes out of these situations. Patients have the potential to learn that expectations are not necessarily their friends, and that there are pleasures that become available when they become more open to what their life can be, apart from what they thought it would be.
The Opportunity Isn’t Always Obvious – but It Is Always There
The hard part is that we have seen this movie many times. We know the trajectory of illness and recovery (or not.) We understand many of the feelings that can come forward. To the patient or their family members, it is all new. Often they believe we couldn’t possibly understand what they are going through. They may mistake our calm of experience for not caring. They misread our knowledge of the likely trajectory as only seeing them as “yet one more case.” And often the learning and benefits of the experience are not happening now. They may emerge next month, or next year, or even further in the future.
Our jobs are to navigate between the dangers and realities of right now, and the opportunities that will emerge. For my part, I’m enthusiastic. With each new patient, I see another great new human being to know and care about. Another set of hopes and dreams to support. Another wonderful exploration into what makes life worth living, and the opportunity to plot a path in that direction. I may not be able to finish the work, but I sure can enjoy starting it. There’s my own transcendence in this process too. I learn about my normal, and explore what makes my life worth living. I get to be a human being doing something good in the world, every day.
That’s why I do it.