Practicing Empathy
In the ICU we meet people on their worst day.
Jack Lyons, MD, Intensivist
Any conversation about a person’s imminent dying is challenging. That conversation is made markedly worse when it can’t be held in person, when you can’t read body language, when you can’t see facial expressions and pause appropriately to let a person get a tissue. Those conversations are challenging, by definition; they’re markedly more so on the telephone.
Even pre-pandemic in the ICU, we meet people on their worst day. And so we know to allow some grace, that some people grieve angry, and some people grieve in a confrontational way.
It’s one thing to know that intellectually and deal with it twice a week, it’s another thing to deal with it twice in an hour, times 12 hours a day. Empathy is something that is actively practiced – it is not something that is inherent. It’s a skill like any other and it becomes a challenge to actively maintain that.
When this resides to some degree, hopefully, when the sting of the ugliness has started to wane, many of us can look back on this with some pride and say, ‘I did the best I could. I helped a lot of people. When my community needed me I answered the call.’ And hopefully that can be good enough to help us start to heal and help us remember this in a way that is not all heartache and tragedy. I hope.