My Words on the Wards experience has been extremely rewarding and enlightening. In the short amount of time I spent at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, I had the opportunity to meet eight incredible different patients. My initial goal coming into the experience was to see how much of an impact I could have on a patient’s life through motivational interviewing and health education regarding their particular chronic condition. However, their stories have touched my life and how I will continue to practice medicine more than I could have imagined.
One of the most memorable patients that I met was on my first shift. He was a San Francisco native and former war veteran. After serving our country, he fell down on his luck, struggling to find a steady job and eventually turned to alcohol to cope with his recurrent PTSD episodes. He soon lost touch with his immediate family and found himself on the streets as rent became less affordable for native San Franciscans. A week prior to his admission, he was found face down in an alleyway, only to be resuscitated by the paramedics using Narcan - an opioid reversal agent. He was later admitted to the hospital for a severe pneumonia that could have made him severely septic. When I asked whether he had symptoms of his pneumonia prior to being taken into the hospital emergency, he responded that he had a wet cough for weeks. However, he never considered visiting even an urgent care clinic. He had always feared the health care system since he has never been taken seriously due to his social standing.
I took a mental pause and realized that my partner and I were doing much more than educating a patient on hypertension or diabetes, but forging a relationship that could help heal even deeper wounds opened up by years of neglect by our health care system. We all have a story to tell and we all deserve to be heard. By starting a narrative with our patients, we as future health care providers have the ability to learn from some of the most resilient people in the city of San Francisco. We can develop a deeper layer of empathy that goes beyond measuring pain scores but acknowledges the longstanding existence of oppressive systems. From this lens, we can start to identify the relationship between the health of our patients to racial differences, immigration status, language barriers, and housing instability, among numerous other factors. I understand that working as an attending physician will be difficult one day, even unbearably frustrating at times. Yet, I hope I remind myself of days like this when even a small conversation became an even bigger victory.