May 2020: Resilience
May usually brings a mix of rain and sun, some days with beautiful 70 degree weather, and some days with 40 degree dreariness. I’ve found the perfect spot in my garden where the covered porch protects me from the drizzle, where I can set up a small reclining chair to work while watching the flowers soak up alternating rain drops and sun rays. For a short while, the sun peaked through grey clouds. A little bumble bee emerged from one of the poppy flowers with curled petals, just enough to protect it from rain exposures. The little bee buzzed back and forth, seemingly happy to return to work. What a resilient little guy.
Resilience has been the pinnacle of my work in community health centers, having observed people make choices to emerge from hardships stronger, prouder and wiser. I’ve watched refugee patients thrive despite their severe PTSD and permanent scars from warfare. I’ve witnessed homeless patients push on not knowing when their next meal will be. And I’ve seen broken spirits mend after tragic losses that should have destroyed the strongest of us. My entire family are political refugees; my parents have lost their oldest daughter, their homes, their identity and freedom during and after the Vietnam war. They came to the US with very little, including the few words they knew in English. They, like so many others, chose to be resilient instead of being wrecked by their tragedies.
2020 will go down in human history as the year of the modern pandemic. But, it is not just the pandemic of the biological warfare between humans and a micro-organism. It is also a pandemic of human divisiveness. Some days, we wake up with so much sadness and controversies in the news, it is hard to find truths. This pandemic has and will continue to decimate worldwide economies, mount death tolls, and challenge healthcare systems in every country.
Healthcare institutions struggle everywhere in the US. At the last regional residency and fellowship meeting, some of my colleagues discussed the financial difficulties each of their organizations must face, both in private and public sectors. Some question whether their educational programs will survive, as organizations are forced to tighten up and focus only on the bare necessities.
As healthcare providers, we have served our patients. But our patients have also served us by teaching us about resilience. Despite the worst tragedies, some of them have chosen to survive. We too as a whole, will survive. But resilience can only happen once we allow ourselves to grieve what once was, and become free to move on to the next stage. And sometimes, living in the moment, appreciating the here and now is a strategy to move forward. How will you counsel your learners to focus on the moment, to serve our patients with positive intentions. Because that is what we are here to do, in this moment. As teachers and mentors, we need to recognize our own struggles, our own reaction to this multifaceted pandemic. Only then can we help our learners through their own reactions. As teachers, we should choose and model resilience through our own learning process, especially in unprecedented times. We can choose to walk away from this with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the human struggles. For a short time, we get a peek into the difficult choices that some of our patients have faced, with some facing it for most of their lives. It is through our own experiences that we can strive to understand and empathize with others’ struggles.
Resilience is a choice.
That bumble bee continued to buzz about. Not knowing if the rain will come down again, I watched it in awe for a few minutes, until somewhere deep within its instinct, the bee took off to bring home its collected nectar for the day.