Embracing the Good, the Bad, and the Weird

Embracing the Good, the Bad, and the Weird

Megan Hansen, MD

I decided to become a doctor to tell stories. When I tell people this, they are understandably confused. Writers tell stories. Editors adjust them. Even lawyers know how to spin a tale. What, they ask me, is the connection between practicing medicine and storytelling?

I tell these people any number of things. I tell them that the first thing we learn in Patient History Taking 101 is to prompt a patient with, “Tell me your story,” and that there is immense power in showing a patient that they are in the driver’s seat. I tell them that, in How to be a Third Year Medical Student 101, we learn how to craft a narrative to present patients to our attendings, and that the words have profound impacts on patient care. I even tell them that, in How to Fight Burnout 101, we learn about the importance of writing as both a creative outlet and a mode of advocacy. What I do not tell them, what I have just begun to understand, however, is the way patients’ stories have shaped my own.

It’s strange, this career we have chosen. We are with patients for some of the best and some of the worst and some of the weirdest days of their lives, and we often have no choice but to absorb all of the good and the bad and the weird. Before I started medical school, I thought that I had a relatively strong sense of self—or at least, as strong a sense of self as a 22-year-old fresh-out-of-college, faints-at-the-sight-of-blood, newly-minted medical student can have. As I reflect on my years here, however, I am struck by how much I have been molded by the patients who have come into my life. They have changed my story.

I was with a 22-year-old patient when he found out he had CNS lymphoma, a complication of uncontrolled HIV. I sat with him while the doctors explained his chemotherapy options, keeping a hand on his shoulder while they broke the news that he would likely have less than a year to live. Just an hour before, we had been swapping Netflix recommendations and looking at pictures of his (adorable) one-year-old son. I absorbed the news with him that he would, in all likelihood, not live long enough to see his son’s second birthday. He passed away three months later, and I had a front row seat to his loved ones’ profound grief. These moments changed my story.

I was part of a clinic visit for a 42-year-old woman who had tried for years to get pregnant. She and her husband had gone through several rounds of in-vitro fertilization with two miscarriages but no successful births. They had resigned themselves to the fact that they would never have a child and had tried to make their lives as rich as possible—they adopted a mutt, went on long vacations, and took up gardening. The patient came in for an OB/Gyn office visit because she had missed a period. Assuming she was starting menopause, she wanted to check in and talk about controlling symptoms. Instead, her urine pregnancy test was positive. I sat with her as she sobbed uncontrollably, unable to contain her joy. I was by her side while she video called her husband, who cried even harder. We laughed together and danced around the room for far longer than the 15-minute appointment allowed. These moments changed my story.

I was called to consult on a patient whose mental status overnight had changed; he had reportedly been unresponsive to sternal rub. He had since perked up, but the primary team wanted neurology to evaluate whether he had had a stroke or seizure. I entered the room and asked the patient whether he remembered people trying to wake him up overnight. “Yes,” he told me, rolling his eyes. He went on to share that he found it “very annoying” that people are always “poking and prodding” in the hospital and that his care team “talked too darn much,” so he had decided to “play dead to punish them.” Just a month prior, I had lost my grandfather, a less dramatic but similarly no-nonsense Kansas farmer; this patient reminded me so much of him that I laughed until I cried. I ended up sitting with him for an additional 30 minutes as we swapped stories about our loved ones. These moments changed my story.

Pre-rounds, rounds, orders, consults, afternoon rounds, around and around. It is easy to get lost in the tasks and the routine and forget to pause for the moments of humanity. As I look ahead to my next steps, I am most looking forward to countless more moments that will change my story. The patients who will make me cry or smile or laugh until my belly hurts. The attendings who will remember a patient’s birthday and go out of their way to celebrate it and the nurses who remember family members’ names and the peers who will make me feel like I am not alone. This job is good and it’s bad and it’s weird, and my only hope is that we allow ourselves to be flexible, to be unsure of what sort of doctor we want to be and to instead allow the strange, wonderful humanity that is the medical field to shape us and never let it stop shaping us. +

Megan Hansen, MD is a graduate of UMass Chan Medical School. She will be pursuing Internal Medicine residency at Duke University.