At Florida State University, there was a project that went on for a few years but seems to have dropped off called HEAL: Humanism Evolving through Arts and Literature. It was headed by a doctor out of the medical college. It’s mission statement is pretty profound:

HEAL acts as a platform where medical students share their growth and development, where faculty and staff impart their knowledge gained from experience, and where members of the community express how health and healing have impacted their lives, so that when viewed together, they may promote humanism.

HEAL has put together several journals worth of works, literary and artistic, by contributors who have written about their experiences both with the healing process, and the more grim process of dying. These are never easy subjects to broach in any medium, but the humanist approach (as opposed to the scientific one) that HEAL promoted is particularly fraught with emotions.

But that is the whole point.

It’s a beautiful, necessary thing for medical students, many of whom will go on to be medical practitioners with patients of their own eventually. The doctors I dealt with were all good practitioners and good people, but their jobs give them so much exposure to pain, suffering and death that their own coping mechanisms were broken.

My mother’s primary physician, particularly, made things difficult by refusing to let go. He loved Mother and had treated her for over ten years. The oncologist was pretty clear that Mother was going into failure, but the primary doctor, a hardworking and compassionate man, could not see what was in front of his face. He was grieving and in denial, acknowledging that her liver was failing and that she was rife with malignant tumors but simply unable to allow Poppa to “call it,” despite him having power of attorney and a copy of Mother’s living will on file.

I don’t know if a program like HEAL would have made the doctor’s reactions any different; maybe not. But it highlighted for me the emotional toll that being a doctor can have. I wish there were a lot more programs and outreach for doctors and nurses and other caregivers. There are some, I know that; but certainly not enough.