Fragile People ...

This week I read a guest blog post by Lindsay in my friend, Francoise Mathieu's, blog and I have asked Lindsay's permission to share it with you as well:

After donating blood a friend of mine wrote in a google buzz, "Why are health professionals so rough??? I'm fragile people!"

Sadly, we are rough. We spend so much time patching people up that pretty soon we're like factory workers putting bolts on a widget. It's a form of "compassion fatigue." We're faced with so much sadness and suffering that we slowly, subconsciously, learn to hold our patients at a distance. But somehow, some patients, some situations, find their ways deep into our hearts.

This weekend I was changing a dressing on a particularly nasty bed sore on a sweet young lady who is close to my age. The sore was so nasty, and the patient so young that I couldn't help but let my heart go out to her and to feel pained for her situation. I did my best to let her see and feel my empathy and made sure to talk to the next shift about a few things that could be done to make her more comfortable.

To respond to my friend's comment, we health professionals are also fragile people, but we've wrapped our hearts away so that we can do our jobs professionally and efficiently. But we're grateful for comments like yours, and for patients like mine that remind us that we're all fragile people. (Emphasis mine.)

Thank you, Lindsay, for this reminder that we are all fragile but that we can, as Whitney Houston sings, " ... find our strength in love".