I think about time a lot now. My days are ruled by schedules and cases and meetings, and I spend much of my day reacting to the pressures of the unrelenting sweep of the second hand as it moves around turning into minutes and hours, never slow enough for me to accomplish everything I need to do.
Molly McCormick is a practicing anesthesiologist who has worked in anesthesiology for the past 33 years.
It is not just me either. Everyone around me is caught up in the same time pressure. We call it “production pressure” now, just as we are encouraged to call our patients “clients” and our visits “encounters.” In the world of the Operating Room where I work, we receive e-mails asking us why we started our case “late” when the electronic medical record detects a difference in the stated start time and what happened. Spaces to gather and time to use them have both gradually disappeared and with so many new people and so many temporary people, the need for that space is going away too. Everyone is rushed, and tired and multitasking.
In the Field Notes essay “Mr. Brown,” Lauren Klingman (Fall 2022 Intima), I felt again the connection between physician and patient. The encounter happens over just fifteen minutes and yet the details and feeling of those minutes has endured. The compassion evoked by the encounter, the details of the exchange, the reflection on the newness of being a medical student and learning to have these conversations is felt and forever remembered.
In my own Field Notes titled “Hurried,” I too, felt the impact of a small moment: The words and stories that fill out the world of diagnosis and procedure. I wonder sometimes now if we are losing that felt connection, the value of those moments. I know that during COVID, the simple question “How are you?” that I asked with sincerity led one resident at the hospital to stop and breathe and say “No one had asked her that” and how grateful she felt for that moment of connection and compassion.
We in the Narrative Medicine world know how valuable the story is. The story is all. The present, the past, the future, the cause and the cure. It is also the bridge to understanding and the path to compassion and compassion is all.
I am not immune to the time pressure. I multitask even as I know it is not possible. I also pause, listen and have genuine curiosity for the stories around me. I did not go into medicine or the practice of anesthesiology for these stories, but they are what I will take away the most. They are also what has made my career interesting, given me so much meaning and continues to deepen my own compassion for the world around me. What better cure for our burdened system right now. What better cure for the world.—Molly McCormick
Molly McCormick is a practicing anesthesiologist who has worked in anesthesiology for the past 33 years.