Refusing to Miss the Point: In Healthcare and in Life.

For my whole life, I put up walls. You know, the ones that you think protect you from the outside world, from other people. That made for an easy transition into healthcare, as keeping patients at a distance—holding that “professional boundary”—was of utmost importance.

And then I met Andy. He showed me what walls really do to a person, and he helped me shatter mine. We met right there in the middle. That is where healing happened for both of us, and in our time together—we came to remember the point of it all.

He was in handcuffs when we first met—with an armed prison guard on either side of him—and somehow I knew that was the least of our worries (I could see it written on his face). He was also barely able to walk. I was his physical therapist. I suppose the situation should have made me uneasy, maybe I was supposed to be scared of Andy, but I wasn’t. He had this sweetness to him and kindness in his eyes; we were fast friends he and I.

Andy had broken his ankle over a year ago, while in prison. He told me they “didn’t really look at it in medical” and it “never healed right.” By this time, his ankle was very stiff, still swollen, and extremely painful. His pain had turned chronic and so had his despair. There were many things that broke my heart about Andy’s story, but the layer below that, was the privilege to hear his story and the weight of it.

It was my job in our system to care about a lot of little things, like his broken ankle’s mobility, his gait pattern, and the health of his skin, but for me it was always story first, the truest and scariest one  (even if it broke my heart).

Somehow in our friendship and our work together, Andy trusted me enough with the truth. Trust is hard to earn, and truth even harder to tell with two big guys with guns in the same room, but somehow we made our way. We talked about the small mistake he had made, the minimal “crime” that had landed him in a Texas prison and the bureaucratic justice-injustice system nightmare he had experienced for over two years. He told me about just getting his own business started when he ended up in jail. We talked about life. I always made Andy laugh, which he would resist with all his might because he was embarrassed of his smile, his teeth were literally rotting without dental care.

Some weeks Andy would come in on crutches, sometimes in a wheelchair, and his ability to walk and bear weight on his ankle, seemed to have everything to do with the state of his soul. We talked about that too. Somewhere in our work on his ankle and his walking, in our storytelling and collaboration on pain–he started to learn how his pain and story were connected, and not in a fairytale way, in a real one.

I’ve always known that the body and pain are the great communicators, part of a deep conversation that is crucial to not only listen to, but to become a part of. Andy and I worked on that a lot, on letting the body tell us about how he was doing, when he didn’t have the words.

Some days he was too proud to speak or cry in front of the guards, it depended on who was with him. His dignity was all he felt he had left, and some days he didn’t even feel he had that. So if he was having a bad day, instead of crying in front of the guards, he would look straight at me, with tears welled up in his eyes, and he and I both knew he didn’t need to say a damn thing.

Andy was a teacher too and he taught me so much not just about the twisted darkness of incarceration, but also about the human spirit. I watched that system, those walls, slowly break his soul. We worked to put it back together. I would get worried if he missed a week, he told me I was the only light he had. If I lived my life in fear, I would have let it scare me that he counted on me. Instead, I let it be what it was: important.

We have these walls we put up in health care as providers, and we call it professionalism; of utmost importance is the keeping of a safe distance. But one thing I know for sure, one thing Andy taught me, is that healing doesn’t happen at a distance. It happens in connected proximity. For Andy and I, it happened when his painful story met my open willingness, to suspend doubt and fear long enough for courage to pierce through it.

You see it is possible in health care, and in life, to completely miss the point–the point of being on this planet at all, and the point of being human. If you were to tell me that his ankle range of motion was more important than the state of his human spirit, I would have explained to you why they have everything to do with each other. I would have explained to you that getting Andy to laugh with me was just as important to the healing of his ankle, if not more so, than any exercise I could prescribe. We’ve got a ways to go in not missing the point in health care, and even further to go as a society to not miss the point of life.

Pain (and chronic pain in particular) gets a really bad rap in healing communities. But the thing that has always drawn me toward pain, and people experiencing pain, is one single thing: it tells the truth. Andy taught me that walls can keep you from truth, from seeing yourself and connecting with others. Andy and I had so much more truth to tell, we were pen pals for years.

I’ve got to believe that the point of this life isn’t putting up walls; and if healthcare is for healing, then we need to start the hard work of breaking down those walls, starting with our own. My hope for you, and I, and all of us— is that we stubbornly and continually refuse to miss the point.

~

Author: Amy Thompson DPT, MS
Image: Neal Fowler/Flickr
Editor: Caitlin Oriel

Comments