Hi everyone,
I start all meetings with residents by checking in. What are you up to? What rotation are you on? How are you?
These days, the answers can be fraught. On Friday afternoon a Persian resident explained what it means when the internet goes down in Iran. “It’s so they can kill people,” she said.
Our conversation led to my message to the residency that evening, acknowledging how unsettled many of us feel. A country invaded. Life-saving vaccines undermined. A mother killed. An eerie passivity echoes the old poem: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
And yet…
On Thursday morning, Dr. Gretchen Berland inspired us at Grand Rounds, sharing her work melding medicine and the humanities. That afternoon, I spent two hours with the Chiefs and APDs, working to enhance the residency. I strategized with department leaders to respond to the surge of inpatients struggling with influenza and COVID, while preserving our training mission. In the evening, I called clinic patients who were sick at home to ensure they were eating and drinking and had the medicines they needed.
On Friday, I spent five hours meeting with residents, an hour each, giving and receiving feedback, and reviewing study strategies, research, committee work, procedural skills, and career plans. I asked if they were eating, sleeping, exercising and socializing, and we collaborated on wellness plans if they were not. In the evening, I started preparing for next week’s interviews, reading personal statements which grow more sophisticated and insightful by the year.
I don’t know what to make of this descent into chaos, let alone how to respond. But as a doctor, I’ll render my diagnosis: we suffer from a deficit of kindness, from both the usual suspects and people who should know better. Nothing good can come from war, abandoning global commitments, or justifying violence as a means to make us “safer.” It requires a deficit of kindness to rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.
Despite our collective worries, I am sustained by the kindness that suffuses our residency. Despite the darkness, I see light. Each day, you show that goodness prevails, within our walls, and radiating outwards as a ray of hope.
Enjoy your Sunday, everyone. I’m heading over for a climb up East Rock before settling down to read a few final personal statements for Tuesday’s interview day, our next-to-last.
Mark
P.S. What I’m reading and listening to:
- The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
- What Stephen Miller Gets Wrong About Human Nature by Gal Beckerman
- One Sleep Habit Experts Wish You Would Adopt by Caroline Hopkins Legaspi
- Hessy Levinsons Taft, Jewish Baby on Cover of Nazi Magazine, Dies at 91 by Michael S. Rosenwald
- The Flu Really Is That Bad by Katherine J. Wu
- The New Food Pyramid, Brought to You by Big Meat by Matt Prescott
- The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt
- 'The Interview': George Saunders Says Ditching These Three Delusions Can Save You with David Marchese
- Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters By Steven Pinker
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life By George Saunders