On my second day of classes during Physician Assistant school with my final undergraduate classes completed only days earlier, I walked into a lab room with 11 bodies to begin my anatomy dissections. I had briefly thought about how I was going to handle this moment, thanks to my class through the Center for Compassionate Care in Medicine where we spoke about how some medical students struggle with anatomy lab. I did not even know if we, as PA students, were going to be dissecting so I put that thought out of my mind and decided to cross that bridge if and when I got to it.
Working at a hospice home the summer before, I had been around dead bodies, washing them and preparing them for burial. But the difference was that I had known the spirits that enlivened those bodies before their deaths. I had lived with them and loved them. Handling their bodies was my final gift to them, a process I found healing in its ancient history. But this was entirely different. This was scientific. I had no idea what these people's names were, let alone what they were passionate about, what their voices sounded like, what made their eyes light up, who they lived for. It occurred to me that this was my first test of balancing, in my work of medicine, seeing people or seeing problems.
In my health care experience as a volunteer and my role as a resident assistant at Notre Dame this past year, I experienced many health crises and problems, but my role was as a minister, an emotional and spiritual support who coordinated practical help rather than distributed it. From this moment on, I realized I was to be a provider of care, a doer of medicine, someone who held the scalpel and focused on the task at hand. This was a spiritual shift for me, the contrast of it sharpened by the large degree of gruesomeness associated with my task. Am I to see this woman, this body, this cadaver, as a human to whom I am grateful for, for whom I pray, or as the object of my lab instruction for the day.
Medicine seems to imply that compartmentalization of our spiritual side, which allows us to deeply feel and empathize, is necessary in order to not become emotionally exhausted or experience compassion fatigue. But as I have been working with the woman who graciously donated her body so I could learn and save future lives, I have tried to honor her with gratitude and respectful language. Of course in medicine some compartmentalization is necessary to be able to competently do your job and it is unhealthy to dwell on difficult situations your patients are dealing with, but to entirely compartmentalize is unhealthy too. Allowing myself to experience gratitude for the woman in my anatomy lab, praying for her and feeling empathy for her and her family is motivating me to be a better student, to not let her donation go to waste, and to become the best PA I can be.
All who go into medicine will struggle to balance empathy and detachment in all that they do. But having an open, respectful, and compassionate heart does not hinder you from being competent, instead, if done with the right balance, it can spur you to greatness. For me this balancing act has begun in anatomy lab, and I am forever grateful to a woman I have never met for helping to teach me this.
Kaitlyn Kennedy recently graduated as a theology major with the Class of 2016. She is currently in PA school at Indiana University in Indianapolis and is interested in pursuing geriatrics or hospice care.
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