I am well aware that I am a fraud. I call myself a writer but the last creative writing instruction I received was in 1994. I conveniently skirted around taking even one creative writing course in college. Sure, I was an English major, but perhaps I was petrified at that vaunted writers’ circle critique. I do miss having pieces percolate in my head. When tasked with writing my side of our non-profits origin story, some lines did start to flicker into existence. I sat down last night and started to type. I also found 20 other things to do, but here’s my first draft of why I care about stories being told, and heard.
1/6/17 00:30
Blessed with two passions, writing, and medicine, I took the arguably easier route of becoming a doctor. It was through medicine, however, that I learned that pivotal skill for telling stories: listening. Now, eighteen years after graduating from college and devoting myself to health care, I revel in the gift of the thousands of stories I have been tasked with translating and sublimating into action.
Each patient and family that walks through my exam room door is a question, a suspicion, a fear, a story. While medicine retreats behind the shelter of the passive voice and the archaic scaffolding of Latin etymology, that record is art. I am proud of the many thousands of voices I have listened to, and hopefully more than a few I sublimated into the stories that my patients needed to be heard.
I speak passable medical and childish conversational Spanish. Often my patients are more fluent in English than I am in their tongue. Out of respect and embarrassment, I may start in English, but I inevitably slip into Spanish, even if their answers are in English. “Una cosa mas, doctor”. Patients of all languages often have one more thing to tell you as you get up to walk out the door. When I converse in my cacophony of Spanish, however, I sense that these patients have waited many visits to ask their una cosa. I am always astounded at the trickle that bursts into torrents, dammed up for too long. I may make a fool of myself, but I am trying to listen to their stories, and they are aching to be heard.
Even in medical school, we are taught about the dangers of over-relying on pattern recognition. I have never forgotten the chair of a department who cautioned not to listen to chairs of departments. Those so lofty have forgotten to how to doubt what they think they hear and already know. How many times have I’ve arisen, assessment and plan made, only to catch an extra phrase from a patient that forces me to sit once more? After so many thousands of stories, I must hold quick diagnosis at bay.
Our goals have with YourWords STL have been simple, honest, and earnest. We hope to give each student as personal and consistent an ear as possible. We work to help hone the students’ tools to tell their unheard and unlistened to stories. And in the couple years of programming we have completed, I believe we have helped them amplify their voice. That is our central mission, but it falls short if we do not work on the ability of the rest of us to truly hear. Those of us on the other side of the exam table must sift through our institutional biases, privilege, ignorance, inexperience, and lack of fluency. We must strive to gain fluency, but more vitally, quiet our own minds and listen to the stories we are gifted.
