I always thought caring was something that was easy to do, but often forgotten. If only we could all slow down enough to listen, and have empathy. But I’ve come to realize how uncomfortable ‘just’ caring can be. Truly having empathy for someone else’s pain creates an itch for action. I heard a quote recently that stuck with me. The common expression is don’t just sit there, do something, but when it comes to terminal illness, we need to invert that — don’t just do something, sit there.

Over the past few months, I’ve come to the opinion that the relationship between time and empathy is two-fold. You need time to form empathy, and giving someone your time demonstrates empathy. When it comes to self-care, we talk about taking time for yourself, and just the same, caring for others is something we cannot do short on time, especially in healthcare, where time is such a valuable commodity. Perhaps this leaves us with a more daunting challenge of how to slow down healthcare. In a system overcome with a desire for efficiency, how might we articulate the value of both giving and taking your time?

I’ve also been asked if this year has been what I expected it to be. My answer is no, but also that I’m not sure what I expected it to be, which are perhaps conflicting statements. But these past few months, with the halfway point of the year behind me, I was wrestling with these unmet and undefined expectations. I had to let go of the things I thought I might learn in each place, or at least the ways in which I thought I might learn them, in order to realize the things that I was learning.

The high-risk maternity ward, where the training session was set to take place, was crowded, hot, and dirty to paint a picture with adjectives. But perhaps more vividly, I wasn’t sure I was even in a hospital. A tilted shelf poorly bore the weight of a few cardboard boxes labeled “supplies.” Heavily pregnant women sat on the floor beside the more or less fortunate ones in hospital cots. The room was all concrete, and the air was muggy. I left a few hours later with three mosquito bites as souvenirs. The women semi-attentively listened to the training session, but many were clearly uncomfortable or disengaged. It made me wonder is there even a place for this caregiver training when so many fundamentals are missing?