The practice of medicine and yoga, my two passions.
This job, this career can just take it out of you. All of us who work wading through the routine illnesses of ordinary people who walk into our exam rooms know this. The day to day can be so frustrating but our patients pull us in. The pull to engage can be magnetic. People are all flawed, including us. We get to witness people in their best and worst moments. It keeps us humbled. We get to be present and trusted to ease pain, explain test results, to show them their own strengths. To tell them why they need a medication or vaccine or why they don’t. We get to see ordinary people with extraordinary courage and beauty.
We come to work meeting up with those fearing for their own mortality, many rightly so. We may treat broken hands, broken hearts, swollen feet, a cough. We fine tune lists of medications to offer ease, more rest, more fluid movements, freer breaths. Along the way we get to see what it looks like when the cancer is gone, or walk again after a stroke. We greet our patients after the amputation has healed, after the grief lifts. I sat with a young man the same age as my son, who had a brain tumor removed, his scalp tender and bruised, green eyes smiling telling me about the movie he was going to go see.
All of this helps us navigate what will surely come our way one day. Practicing medicine is an exercise in humility, a way to know people I never otherwise would have met. It makes the world more human, more fragile, more connected.
Some of us practice yoga, some throw temper tantrums or go to the gym on the way home, letting the day pour off us. However we process this work, let it be a calling.