Alone together.

My patient, a professional working mom, sent me a letter thanking me for my time during an appointment discussing her medical issues and also for helping her feel less alone in her daily struggles.

I was surprised because during that appointment I had wondered if I wasted her time or should have enforced more firm boundaries. The day of that telemedicine appointment I was running late for my first appointment of the day. How do you get late while getting to work online when there is no real place to go to, no traffic to manoeuver? Well, you get late when early in the morning one of your children opens the fridge and a glass bowl containing leftover lentil soup falls from the fridge and gets shattered into small pieces all over the kitchen floor. Then while you are cleaning up the mess, you step on a shard of glass but cannot see it and have to limp up the stairs to get to your desk to start work. As you sit down to log into Epic, your son comes in saying he cannot log into his class. While I am calling my son’s school to get help, my phone buzzes as my assistant texts me saying the patient is waiting online and I am now emailing the teacher after rolling my eyes at the AI generated phone options.

Sometimes it makes me really angry at my wonderful husband because he gets to leave the house at 7 AM everyday for work. I wish so badly at times that I didn’t have to work from home. The pillows flying around from across the hallway wouldn’t land near my desk and I wouldn’t need to stop my children from crawling on the floor in my room. The days at work in person aren’t easy either. The breathing space created by being away from home is further trapped between layers of PPE. I get frustrated when I have difficulty doing simple ear exams while keeping the face shield on. The thought of removing the face shield to do ear exams looking for an infection makes me fear the moment I could get infected. Pushing the shame, anger and guilt away I start the zoom appointment with my patient fumbling with apologies attributing my late arrival online to technical issues! These excuses sound so lame to my own ears.

We went ahead with the appointment and I discussed her concerns, spoke about some medication interactions and my inability to increase medications as desired by her. It is heartbreaking when you feel someone’s disappointment in their gaze even on screen. I tried my best to explain to her the risks, benefits and alternatives. As we were finishing up and I was in between the two annoying clicks needed to end zoom meetings, she said she was always struggling alone, juggling her work and her family. Her statement tugged at my heart. I couldn’t just end the meeting without responding to her even though I really wanted to be on time with the next patient. I tried to stay with my breath while frantically choosing words in my mind and assessing how much time I could afford to spend on this conversation. I said we are all struggling at different levels during these difficult times and trying to do the best we can within the context of our lives. I told her how I can totally relate to her as I feel the pain for my three children struggling with remote schooling that I chose for them and I also feel my own energy levels draining everyday with the rising piles of dirty dishes in the sink, washed laundry that does not get folded, paperwork and mail that never gets sorted, the endless lists of other things not done and then nowhere to go to escape from this misery. The worst is the guilt that I feel, for getting overwhelmed by these seemingly petty things when so many people in the world are doing so much worse.

Yes I am thankful for staying healthy, for having a job, having food on the table but it is still a difficult isolating time. We are together in this yearning for togetherness in each of us. After reading her letter I realized that my patient had done the same thing that she was thanking me for. She made me feel less isolated in my struggles every day. The illusion of perfection in each other’s life propels us onto a race.

Sharing experiences makes us live them again, moment by moment which is healing. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s important to pause and sit with that annoyance and discomfort of things not being where we wish them to be. I realize that I don’t need to yell at my children provoked by every angry thought. In that moment of sharing our struggles, my patient and I walked alongside each other next to a babbling brook. The brook symbolized the daily turbulence in our own life, a life being lived, in the most embodied and healing way.

At the end of the day I hope to be comfortable with all the different roles I play in the world. Today I have done enough and will rest. Tomorrow I will try again. That is my plan. At the end of every day we are getting closer to the end of the pandemic, when we will all finally rejoice and dance again hugging each other.