The Power of Connection
It is Christmas Eve day and I am still working. Oh, how I wish I was done. In fact, I am done. I am tired to the bone from the likes of COVID-19 and all it has had to offer. I just want to get home and rest. And yet my day awaits; patients to be seen and called, forms to be filled out, and endless messages from nurses to be answered.
He’s checking them once, he’s answering them twice, he knows not to be naughty, just be nice….
A friend calls me to wish me happy holidays just before my first telemedicine encounter. The sound of her voice energizes me. The coffee had not done that, but the holiday greeting gets me off to a good start. In my first appointment my patient talks about how important a book he was given as an early Christmas present is keeping him going through Covid. It is a book about New Haven where he was born and raised and lived for 32 years. It brings him back to his boyhood and he is energized as well. We hand one another along with reminiscing. And this is such a thoughtful moment. I talk about my children being born in Hartford and we connect, we share something through our Connecticut stories on this eve of Christmas. It is what Raymond Carver would call “a small good thing.”
But I am not done. On to my next call which is conducted through video; this is a new patient encounter. My patient talks about being a carpenter and I complement him for his skills. I explain I am in awe of someone who can use their hands so effectively. He tells me he is in awe of someone who can use their brain so effectively. I talk about my grandfather and his carpentry skills and my attempts at carpentry in my barn and we have a laugh together. We share and we talk and we laugh and we get through this tough time together on this day when I think both of us just want to rest and get away from Covid. Once again, a small good thing connecting us and handing each other along.
My next patient comes in to see me in person. When I ask him how he’s getting through Covid he talks about a device his sister gave him on the back of his tv that give him free access to Netflix and Disney channel. He is ploughing his way through the Avenger movies and giggles with delight as he talks about watching the new Mulan movie. I talk about my daughters loving Mulan and how I have seen all the Avenger movies. We get into some of the details of the storyline. Of course, we also eventually deal with his high blood pressure and being overweight, and the way he is trying to get back to walking again. However, our real connection happened in the brief conversation before all of that.
My next patient insists on talking by phone only. I miss not seeing her face, yet her voice is soothing to my ear. She talks about taking small gifts to her neighbours – making Rollo and pecan and pretzel melts during this time when she has no money. She has had to buy her son the smallest of gifts but she’s glad she can give him something. She takes some other neighbours bread that she made. She is so looking forward to the Covid relief check of $600 and wishes it could be the $2000 that is now being discussed. I acknowledge how important that money would be for her, but I don’t fully understand my own attempt at empathy I realize when she tells me it will allow her to get her tooth fixed which will cost $900. And now I truly wish and pray and tell her yes indeed, I hope that money comes through: “your tooth is very important.”
These moments with my patients on Christmas Eve keep me going just like my friend’s early morning phone call. It is the human connections in the time of Covid that are so important. A virus has great power and its infectiousness is overwhelming us all in ways far beyond fevers, coughs, and shortness of breath. But the infectiousness of our human connection is a potent antidote. And I for one am grateful for it today.
Hugh Silk, MD, MPH is a professor in the UMMS Department of Family Medicine and Community Health and is working with two other faculty to create a UMMS Medical Humanities Lab.
