By Ron Epstein, MD
Several years ago, I visited the local emergency room at the hospital where I had worked for many years. Rapidly worsening abdominal pain had interrupted an otherwise restful sleep.
The care I received was excellent from a technical standpoint. The doctors had checked my medical record prior to seeing me. They were attentive, concerned and asked all of the right questions about location, quality, evolution, and associated symptoms. They drew blood and attended to my comfort. They explained the situation well, including the uncertainties and need for further evaluation.
The moment that stood out, though, was during my journey from the ER to the radiology suite, where I was to have a scan. At some point during the labyrinthine and occasionally bumpy trajectory, the transport guy stopped the gurney, walked to a place where we could make eye contact, and asked, “How are you doing?” He waited for my answer. I felt myself relax, relieved to be in knowing hands.
While the other faces I had encountered in the ER are now a blur, I can clearly remember his. I’ve never seen him again and cannot remember his name. I can only imagine what motivated him to engage in this momentary gesture of connection, companionship, and care. I imagine that he saw my face, worried, wincing at times. Perhaps he sensed my disorientation seeing familiar territory from strange perspective, supine on a gurney. There was no fluff, only four words, “How are you doing?” Being there, present, attentive and attuned, not just phoning it in.
My visit to the emergency room was nothing special. I was one of many patients who arrive with abdominal pain. All ended well. But those four words were a reminder that “nothing special” moments are opportunities for small gestures that can make all the difference.
Ps. I am a regular reader of a blog from my friend, Marc Lesser, Zen teacher, MBA and executive coach (Read his Substack here) and he recently shared a poem that spoke to me.
If You Knew, by Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?