Category Archives: Health

Tribal Pride and Tribalism

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NaBloPoMo 2017: Field Notes from a Life in Medicine

What tribes do you belong to?  How do they serve you, and you them?  How not?

I think of this today as I have traveled out of state to speak to a Department of Surgery on physician well-being.  I wonder how often they have internists present at their Grand Rounds?  What a tremendous honor, I’m so excited to be here!  I hope my talk will be useful and memorable, as I represent my field and my institution, in addition to myself.  In the talk I describe the central tenets of Tribal Leadership and culture, and how to elevate ours in medicine.

So I’m thinking tonight about tribal pride and tribalism—the benefits and risks of belonging.

We all need our tribes.  Belonging is an essential human need. To fit in, feel understood and accepted, secure—these are necessary for whole person health.  And when our tribes have purpose beyond survival, provide meaning greater than simple self-preservation, our membership feels that much more valuable to us.  But what happens when tribes pit themselves against one another?  How are we all harmed when we veer from “We’re great!” toward “They suck”?

Of course I’m thinking now of intra-professional tribalism:  Surgery vs. Medicine vs. Anesthesia vs. OB/gyne vs. Psychiatry.  Each specialty has its culture and priorities, strengths and focus.  Ask any of us in public and we will extol each other’s virtues and profess how we are all needed and equally valuable.  Behind closed doors, though, internists will call orthopods dumb carpenters; surgeons describe internists’ stethoscopes as flea collars, and the list of pejoratives goes on.  Maybe I’m too cynical?  My interactions with colleagues in other fields are usually very professional and friendly—until they are not.  I have experienced condescension and outright hostility before.  But can I attribute it to tribalism—that general, abstracted “I’m better than you because of what I do” attitude—or to individual assholery?  Or maybe those docs are just burned out?  As with most things, it’s probably a combination.  Based on what my medical students tell me, negative energy between specialties definitely thrives in some corners of our profession.  Third year medical students are like foster children rotating between dysfunctional homes of the same extended family—hearing from each why all the others suck.

So what can we do about this?  Should we actively police people’s thoughts and words in their private moments?  I mean part of feeling “We’re Great!” kind of involves comparing ourselves with others and feeling better than, right?  Isn’t some level of competition good for driving innovation and excellence?  Should we even embrace this aspect of tribal pride?  It certainly does not appear to be diminishing, and I have a feeling it’s just human nature, so probably futile to fight it.

I wonder why we have this need to feel better than.  Is it fear?  A sense of scarcity?  As if there is not enough recognition to go around?  Like the pie of appreciation is finite, and if you get more I necessarily get less?  Intellectually we recognize that we are all needed, we all contribute.  But emotionally somehow we still feel this need to put down, have power over, stand in front.  And it’s not just in medicine.  I see it in men vs. women, doctors vs. nurses, liberals vs. conservatives, and between racial and ethnic groups.  It makes me tired.

But maybe we can manage it better.  Maybe we can be more open and honest about our tribal tensions, bring them into the light.  Yes, I think surgeons can be arrogant.  And that’s okay to a certain extent—it takes a certain level of egotism to cut into people, and when things start going wrong in the OR, I think that trait can help make surgeons decisive and appropriately commanding when necessary.  I imagine surgeons get impatient with all the talking we internists engage in.  So many words, so little action, they might think.  And yet they understand that words are how we communicate with patients, how we foster understanding and trust.  Maybe we can all do a better job of acknowledging one another’s strengths and contributions out loud and in front of our peers (and learners).  The more we say and hear such things, the more we internalize the ideals.

Tomorrow I get to spend a morning with surgical attendings and residents.  I hope to contribute to their learning during my hour long presentation, but I really look forward to my own learning, to expanding my understanding and exposure to parts of my profession that I don’t normally see.  I’m humbled at the opportunity, and I will look for more chances to bring together colleagues from divergent fields.  If we commit, we can connect our tribes and form a more cohesive profession.  That is my dream for future generations of doctors—to be freed from infighting and empowered to collaborate at the highest levels, for the benefit of us all.

 

Ode to My Dawn Simulator

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NaBloPoMo 2017: Field Notes from a Life in Medicine

Did you notice the photo on my post Gratitude Again?  That was the view out my office window around 5:30pm last week.  These days I appreciate the winter dusk a lot more than years past, mostly because the physically hardest years of training and my kids’ lives (for me) are over.  My intern year I rotated in the medical intensive care unit (MICU, or MICK-you, or just ‘the unit’ for short) in November.  Usual days started by 6am, and finished whenever my patients were stable enough for me to leave, usually past 7pm.  I really never saw the sun that whole month—not from outside, anyway.  Every third night on call, my resident and I covered the whole place.  The longest I ever spent in the hospital was 5am until 10pm the following night—41 hours straight, only to be back again the next morning at 6.  And that was nothing compared to the generation of doctors who trained before me.  Thinking back on it now, I can still feel the saturating fatigue, the utter hopelessness of ever seeing the call room, let alone lying down on a bed.  Thank GOD those days are over.  They weren’t all bad, though.  Residency was one of the hardest things I’ve done, and it was also intensely rewarding.  The friendships I made those years, the unique shared experiences—I carry these with me also.  They made me strong and gave me confidence.

But if I thought getting up in the dark during intern year was hard, somehow doing it as an attending with two little kids was even harder—go figure.  The sleep deprivation of working motherhood is a completely different animal from that of residency, its toll multiplied on family.  The blaring alarm clock, the utter blackness of the bedroom, the contrast of cozy warmth under the blankets with the cold still air above.  They all conspired to make me peevish, sullen, and supremely unpleasant to be around every morning—an additional cost to my soul every time I lashed out at the kiddos out of my own exhaustion.  To borrow a phrase from Vee over at Cute Kids, I might well have died of a bad mood or something worse if that situation continued.

So Husband staged an intervention: He bought me a dawn simulator for Christmas.  It’s an ingeniously simple device: An alarm clock with a built-in light dimmer that comes with its own full-spectrum light bulb.  All you have to do is connect it to a bedside lamp.  Then you set sunrise time, as well as duration of rise (I set mine to 6:45, 15 minutes).  Every morning for the past 7 years I wake up naturally from a steadily brightening, gentle and warm glow from one corner of the room.  It’s infinitely more pleasing; no blaring involved.  Of course now I have my iPhone ‘by the seaside’ alarm as back up, especially for this month as I stay up too late writing blog posts.  And I’m not a morning person in general, so no Mary Poppins songs bursting forth with domesticated mechanical birds on my windowsill.  But life is infinitely more tolerable between Halloween and Easter each year now—for all of us.

Thanks, Husband.  Ya done good.

Mom Love

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Somehow tonight I got to thinking about all my patients who are moms.  I am filled with love and admiration, and compassion for all of them.  Maybe it was because today that is what I did most—momming.  Chauffer, meal planner, shopper, meal preparer, science project thingy seeker, organizer of the week to come (meal planner, babysitter/transport arranger, meal planner, shopping planner, piano lesson re-scheduler)…

I feel so grateful that I can work part-time.  I accomplish most of these life tasks on days when I’m ‘not working,’ as I used to say.  Now I call them days on which I ‘don’t see patients.’  All moms work; it’s a full time job with intangible and transcendent benefits, as well as hellish hours, often disproportionately low appreciation, and obviously no financial compensation.  Some of you may have seen a popular article this year on the mental workload of moms.  I highly recommend the short read.  Here’s a slightly older article that also includes references to research on the ‘work-home gender gap.’  And I absolutely love this eloquent, hilarious, and heartfelt to tribute to moms from last year, which is basically encapsulated in the first sentence: “I am the person who notices we are running out of toilet paper, and I rock…”

What tugs at my heart the most sometimes are the moms who have chosen to stay at home, giving up, at least temporarily, a fulfilling and meaningful professional career.  So many of them feel conflicted over making this choice, and then shame over feeling conflicted.  Countless times I have heard some version of, “Please don’t think I don’t love my kids, because I LOVE my kids!  …But (sheepishly) being with them 24/7 is so tiring, and I really miss using those other parts of my brain, having conversations with adults, and solving problems that employ my education and training.  But I love my kids, really I do, and I love being with them and I chose this and I know I should feel so grateful that we can afford for me to stay home, I just feel so guilty for ever wanting to be away from them, what good mom wants that??  But I’m so tired, and sometimes (pause) I wonder if I should have kept my job, worked it out somehow?  I never thought I would feel so torn.”  In these encounters I do my best to validate my patients’ choices, to reassure them that in no way do I question their love for their children just because they long for the company of peers and colleagues, and to address the consequences of their inner conflicts on their health and relationships—with self and with others.  I feel sad and angry that anyone would shame a mom for wanting to have a meaningful life outside of momming.

There’s the guilt of the working mom, also—which springs from the same pathological thinking that no good mom would want to be away from her kids.  But somehow these women seem easier to console, in my experience.  They often derive significant meaning from their work, and even if that is not the case, they take pride in providing for their families.  They also often report seeing themselves as role models for their daughters.  Regardless, I hate that these women have to deal with the same social gremlins as their stay-at-home counterparts—that somehow being a mom and having a career are necessarily divergent ideals.  This is an example of a false dichotomy that serves no useful purpose, and causes many of us to suffer unnecessarily.  Thankfully, others have written extensively on solutions; I really like this article on 8 ways to overcome mom guilt, regardless of your W2 status.

In looking up the articles for this post, I also came across this one, addressing the invisible mental workload of men.  I’m so glad I read it, because it reminds me of another fallaciously dichotomous rabbit hole: when we start exploring and addressing women’s challenges, the discussion too easily devolves into man-hating.  I claim my own susceptibility to this mindset, and thankfully this article helps me rein it in.  The same antiquated social pressures that tell women they ‘should’ always want to stay at home also tell men that they ‘should’ always want to be at work, and GAAAGH, it just kills all of our souls, a little at a time.  The author, Josh Levs, writes:

“All women who notice and keep track of their families’ many needs deserve big props and respect for it. So do the men who do this work. It’s crucial, detail-oriented, and never-ending. It makes a home a home.

“For 2017, let’s resolve to put aside misguided gender assumptions and work together to achieve a better balance and healthy work-life integration—for the sake of women and men.”

I wholeheartedly agree.  Let us stop with the guilt trips and shaming, and give all moms, and dads too, all our love for the ‘momming’ we all do!