Three points for empathy.
Three more for conversational engagement –
For actively listening to the words,
The life,
The distress,
Coming out of your patient’s mouth.
And don’t forget to
Show concern
And say “I’m sorry”
When you ask about the functional limitations
And they say they can’t work,
Or take care of their family,
Or escape for one moment from the constant pain,
Unyielding disease,
Looming thoughts of death.
Three points for building a genuine and trusting relationship.
Three more for greeting the patient
When you walk in the door,
For acknowledging them by
Two identifiers,
One of which is the name they shared with their mother
Who died from cancer,
And that’s why they’ve come to you now,
With fear and trembling and a lump in their breast,
To find out if they share the same fate.
Three points for eye contact.
Three more for asking open-ended questions,
For letting the patient speak uninterrupted,
Because maybe you are the first one to listen after
They realized the life-saving surgery
Removed their cancer,
But left them with a body that
Looks and feels alien.
Or maybe others are tired of hearing about how
They lost their wife a year ago,
And now the alcohol and cigarettes
Are the only things getting them through the day.
Or maybe this appointment,
Discussing medications and allergies and ongoing conditions,
Is the first real human interaction they’ve had in weeks,
A chance to escape feeling old and forgotten.
Three points for attentive body language.
Three more for expressing a desire to help.
Full marks for being a decent human being.
And is it any wonder that when
The classroom comes before the clinic,
We need rubrics to remind us to be human?
Siloed in our screen-lit study halls,
Inundated by torrents of emotionless information,
The relational foundations of medicine
Become transected cerebral hemispheres of
Facts and feelings
That we must learn to mend.
Compassion and humanity
Are reduced to checklist items on our midterm communication assessment,
An incentive to care while we
Study on.
Three points for empathy.
Three more for kind facial expressions,
Like the ones we use to tell our
Closest family and
Dearest friends
That we hear them,
We see them,
We are on their side.
For when a patient sits before us,
And the points have gone away,
What matters is this:
That we see and treat the
Souls of those who entrust us with their lives
Not from a rubric,
But from the heart.
