Artists look to create or capture particular kinds of balance in the world – in pictures, paintings, sculptures and poems. Caregivers do the same. 

            Lunchtime
is a great occasion to hear stories that teach about caregiving. In the
doctor’s dinning room one day I say next to a physician three years into her
practice as an internist.

             I
asked her my favorite question: “How do you give loving care?’

             She thought
I was asking about compassion (instead of loving care which is competence and compassion.) She looked at me the
way caregivers sometimes do when approached by someone with no first line care
experience.

             “I start my
rounds at 6:30 a.m.,” she told me. “If I gave out compassion to every patient
I’d be exhausted by noon. So I’m an actress. I pretend.”

             In fact,
she was a first line caregiver. She was facing the daily demands of very sick
people and I was not.

             I had no business judging her
decision to pretend compassion instead of suffering with it. In fact, she
deserved compassion for everything she had to endure each day.

             Still, I wondered which behavior
would ultimately be more exhausting for her, pretending Love or living it?

             Where is
the balance between “professional” behavior that maintains distance and
compassionate behavior that draws near? At one extreme, the doctor signals a
lack of genuine caring. At the other, getting too close to patients may
interfere with clinical judgment.

             Obviously,
we don’t want a surgeon coming into the waiting area and telling the family
what he or she may be thinking: “Oh God! The blood in there was terrible.”

             We also
don’t want this same surgeon approaching the family and getting melodramatic.

             The finest
caregivers provide answers. “The balance point moves,” urologist Dr. Keith
Hagan told me one day. “Because doctor’s training is so heavily clinical I
think each physician has to develop
compassion. Too many doctors are afraid of it. I lean to compassion because I
know my clinical training will help me maintain the right professional balance.”

             Another
veteran nurse told me, “I became a nurse because I believe in offering
compassion to the sick. If I couldn’t be compassionate in my work I’d be burned
out in a few months.”

             Real compassion drives the highest
competence because real compassion wants the best for the patient. This
doesn’t mean gushing.

             It means loving with grace and
skill.

-Erie Chapman

 Photograph: "Pool & Chairs – Santa Monica" copyright erie chapman 2012