Compassion Fatigue

She was being followed yearly by some of the more famous specialists in the city and was on a first name basis with them. I asked what she did and she humbly told me some very general descriptions.

Wednesday morning, Dr. Vera Etches, tweeted about arriving at Ottawa City Hall without a skirt underneath her raincoat.

For a short period of time, COVID-19 has taken handshakes, hugs, cheek kisses and words of greeting away from us. But, do you know what is really sad? We were already losing these very important culturally appropriate greetings, well before COVID-19. Their loss adds to our sense of loneliness and isolation and our feelings of being disconnected, vulnerable and unsafe.

Every photo has a background. It holds the details hiding behind the main attraction: people walking by, engaged in their own conversations; piles of mail that have not been tidied; dishes in a sink; other people’s beach towels; storefronts and parking meters. These are the parts of a photograph you did not intend to capture, the accidental participants in your memory. This is the place where I exist.

Longevity in medicine necessitates some degree of desensitization. This is part of how we grow. It’s essential. This evolution, however, can come with a cost. With our competence comes the insidious erosion of empathy that creeps in, hand-in-hand with our competence, quietly, relentlessly, and destructively.

As the pandemic wore on, it became increasingly clear that our normal, pre-pandemic lives were bound for the past tense. As a resident in family medicine, I wondered what this might mean for our patient relationships. Would we develop the same rapport, or be able to guide our patients through maintaining health and treating illness as closely and meaningfully as before?