I’m Still Banging The Pan Lids for Front-Line Workers

After two days sitting on a folding chair observing our stressed-out healthcare system, I marvel at the compassion

The nation’s hospitals are under unprecedented stress as the pandemic rages on. Everybody knows that.

And yet it’s an easy thing to forget when you’re on the receiving end of a hospital’s care. You have just found yourself under your own Mt. Everest of stress. It’s hard to think too deeply about the healthcare workers bustling around you in a blur of blue scrubs.

But the one thing I couldn’t miss on a recent trip to the hospital is that every one of those healthcare workers somehow found ample time for compassion. I don’t know from what deep well they were drawing. The compassion kept coming. Gentle. Luminous.

I’m reporting this to you because I keep reading news stories about compassion fatigue. I don’t think that’s correct.

I had a lot of time to contemplate this during my hospital visit. I was a participant, not the patient. My 93-year-old mother had fallen while we were out running some errands. Her arm was broken. The two of us landed in the hospital ER.

Once there I became a stationary item lodged in a rushing stream of activity. I don’t know if sitting on a folding chair is good for healing, but it’s a thing you do a lot of when you land unexpectedly in the hospital. Especially on the day of arrival, while all the particular health issues are still getting sorted. And even more especially when the hospital is overwhelmed by the new Omicron variant, which may or may not be as deadly as previous COVID waves but is certainly managing to infect just about everyone I talk to on Zoom these days.

For the first hours of my vigil I contemplated how guilty I felt about my mother’s fall. It was one of those random mishaps that are impossible to foresee or prevent, but it happened on my watch. When something is no one’s fault in particular, the reasonable answer is to blame myself. Because of course it is.

But while I sat there marinating in toxic self-blame I kept noticing the compassion of the healthcare workers. The EMTs. The ER nurses. The med techs. The PA from ortho. The ER doc. The orthopedic surgeon. The surgical staff. The anesthesiologist.

This is anecdotal I know, but the compassion I witnessed was so universal, in every encounter over a two-day period, that it had to represent something deeper going on. There is a shortage of beds, staff, sleep, swabs, miracle medicines and hours in the day. But everywhere I looked I saw dedicated people finding ways to make the system work even when it’s busting at the seams, and doing it without ever letting on for a minute how weary they all must be. The only possible explanation I can think of for that is compassion.

I had a conversation not so long ago with a pulmonologist who’s near and dear to my heart. He cared for some of the nation’s original COVID victims back in the spring of 2020 and has been at it ever since so if anyone has a right to say he’s done with the whole thing and burned out by compassion fatigue, it’s him. He’s obviously frustrated with the politics and dumbness that keep making the pandemic worse. But once a patient lands in his I.C.U. all that disappears. What remains is compassion. Even when the patient is unvaccinated and the suffering is largely self-inflicted.

His is a more practical view of compassion than the way I generally think of it. It’s purposeful, something vital to the way he does his job. Early in the pandemic people in big cities were celebrating healthcare workers by banging on pan lids when they saw them walking home from their brutal shifts. My daughter stopped at a Trader Joe’s in her scrubs and they gave her a bouquet of flowers. Now the healthcare workers I know and love are getting yelled at by patients and some have had their lives threatened. There is plenty fatiguing them, but I still hear compassion in their voices and its transcendent.

I’d suggest compassion works like its close relative, love. The effect goes both ways, restorative for those on the giving end as much as on the receiving end.

During our wait in the emergency room before a hospital bed opened up I saw a flicker of utter exhaustion in the eyes of the ER doc as he squeezed my mother’s hand. Then the compassion flooded in, he smiled softly, and said, “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

We can learn a lot from the healthcare workers laboring at the center of the storm sweeping over us. Above all, we should learn compassion for one another. That’s what will get us through the troubles we all know lie ahead.