Swearing Makes it Real — @*$# yes!

There’s no delicate way to ask. So I just blurt out the question.

You don’t like a lot of hand gestures.

You have a problem with whole-hearted laughter.

You think one must have an M.D. or a D.O. to understand a doctor's life.

You believe change is an outside job.

You think change will take years.

You think change will be instantaneous.

You’re looking for someone to tell you what to do…

When I first learned that my son was in jail, I cheered.

It was five days after I’d seen him, wild-eyed, head shaved, emaciated. He was 23 years old.

We’d just had a cup of coffee at Starbucks where he’d been contrite about the latest brush with the police. Just five minutes later, he was sitting in my car on the passenger side, no longer sorry.

Kouros Farro MD, MBA, FAAFP knows how to survive.

Farro escaped Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the early 1980s, walked across the border to Turkey, where he slept on the street, stealing food for months; then he lightened his hair, obtained a Danish passport and defected to Germany.

He knows perseverance.

So, this January, when Kouros left his job as a primary care physician with the largest urgent care in his town, it was not as a quitter.

It was in protest.

Rushing to stay on time.

Trying to get caught up on your notes so you can return to less work in the morning.

Missing your family.

Worrying about patients.

Praying you don’t get called.

Jumping in full-heartedly when you do.

I went to see my mother in memory care this week.

She is not well.

The nurse was feeding her and upon seeing me, he quickly turned the task over to me — as if I wanted to spoon feed my mother. I took his seat.

“Hi, mom,” I said in my best sing-songy voice, reserved for children and her.

1. I’ve been married twice.

2. My fear of being alone taught me to love my own company.

3. I forgive myself. Again and again.

4. That’s when I found my life partner.

5. Raising children taught me the most important things about being a coach and an entrepreneur.

6. Being with my mother in her Alzheimer’s disease has taught me how to listen to silence.

For 27 years, Rob Olson, MD lived the rewards and the constant stress of being an OBGYN solo practitioner, pulled between family and work; and between the clinic and hospital. “You’re feeling guilty that you’re not with your family or

If you’re like me — though I’ve devoted my life to it — your eyes glaze over when you read the little hyphenated phrase, self-care. Meaning everything from a bubble bath to psychotherapy, or a vacation to the Bahamas, it started in the yoga/therapy/spa community and has naturally permeated the medical world as an antidote to burnout which, by many accounts, is at an all-time high.

“You cannot pour from an empty cup,” says Jeevan Sekhar MD, who is boarded in four medical specialties. “It took me a while to internalize this concept.”

Yet, physicians try to do the impossible, day after day. It’s as if they, the purveyors of medical science, are themselves somehow impervious to the laws of that same science.

So why don’t more physicians prioritize their own self-care?

When people we love are hurting, just listening seems fruitless. But think about what you want most in the world. So many physicians tell me they yearn to come home to a partner who understands them. This is, in fact, what we all want. Even your patients — especially when they cannot be fixed — want to be heard and seen. Indeed, studies have shown that the best patient outcomes happen when doctors listen without judgement, even if there is no medical cure for what ails them.

Our greatest teachers are those we cannot fix.

Hint: I am not your buddy. I am not your colleague.

I am not a doctor. That is your expertise.

Mine expertise is life. Not because I am living it perfectly, but because it is my life’s work to help you live as fully and truly as you can — as a doctor and most importantly, as a human being.

“I just want to clean off my desk before I go home. Otherwise, it will be there in the morning and start all over again,” a physician recently told me. “But it’s endless.”

This is how the practice of medicine is like a beach house in which physicians are not guests, but glorified house cleaners. Between the parade of patients, you are constantly trying to “sweep up” the sand of the ever-present Electronic Medical Record (EMR).

A physician friend of mine confided in me that he wasn’t sleeping well. He confessed the cause of his poor sleep: “I take charts to bed with me. And sometimes I fall asleep like that.”

I pictured him, this lovely man in his late 40s, single, sleeping with his patients’ charts, the details of their condition closer to his heart than any woman had been in a long time.

I often felt that my physician-husband wasn’t with us, that he never fully came home from the hospital.

I had the sense, though couldn’t name it then, that he’d brought others home with him; other families’ grief, fear, dysfunction and love.

It was as though their stories clung to his clothes like the perfume of another woman or a crying child hanging onto his leg.

He dragged or carried them home. It it felt like there was a crowd with us, clambering for his attention.

When I asked him, “How was your day?” it wasn’t meant to elicit a reflexive answer like “Fine” or “Okay.”

I really meant, “Please introduce me to these people you brought home with you.”

One day, when I first became separated from my physician-husband many years ago, I found myself sitting in my living room in a comfortable low slung chair that I almost never had time to sit in.

I couldn’t focus on reading.

My children were at school. The house was clean. My freelance writing deadlines had been met.

A friend had invited me out and, for the first time since I was 10 years old, I had no idea what to do next.

It wasn’t boredom, but freedom.

This may be similar to what you face on your days off. Today may be that day…

What do physicians and soldiers have in common? More than you’d think…

If you’re like me, you’re a giver. If you’re a physician, you’ve devoted your life to giving. Perhaps, your identity is wrapped up in giving that you don’t know how to receive, even when the gifts are foist upon you. The true challenge for givers is to receive wholeheartedly.

As physicians, you might be facing extra stress, especially if you are on call for any Christmas, Thanksgiving or New Years Eve/Day. I know, because I lived it. My former husband, a neurologist, was often on call for the holidays — at least one of them — each year. Patients come before family. This is what we signed up for. Is it still?

Through my conversations with doctors — and my own life’s journey — here are 7 common practices of happy people…