On Seeing Humanity

One thing this experience has taught me is that patients ought to be viewed in a different light, given they have faced so much hardship, especially the displaced and the injured. Even when doing something as routine as performing a small procedure, I have to remind myself of this.

Western medicine affirms that physicians must be keenly aware of patient safety. Yet that alone is unfeeling. I had to continually affirm that there is a living, breathing individual before me with a story, and that story may have recently and abruptly come to a halt through a tragic and inhumane injury, and for many, unfortunately, to an end.

They came from cities and villages with names such as Touline and Nabatieh, forced to leave their homes while carrying their injuries and facing tremendous loss. They have families who loved them, brothers and sisters whom they have since lost. They had jobs, whether working their land and farming it or working at the local grocery store.

I had to stop myself several times over the past week just to think about those stories and recall who lay beneath that sterile field before I drove my needle or performed a procedure that might cause discomfort, pain, or even further suffering.

It was one of the thoughts that ruminated in my mind each day, and sometimes between each patient. I wanted to know more about their stories. Not to be invasive, nor to be someone who consumes people’s pain or misery as sport, but to become more empathetic, truly; to recognize that their humanity is more than a healthcare outcome or a part of a organizational mission. It is a message, a teacher, and an enduring mark of who they are and what was so unjustly done to them.

I ended today lying in my hospital bed, reflecting a bit more. I wondered, in our comfort—in the world we come from—how we have found it so acceptable to be so far removed from the people who have had it so hard? People who, especially as exemplified by my own faith, are honorable, dignified, and even inheritors of this earth. How have we navigated so far away from them, leaving them to toil and misery?

It’s a disconnect so carefully compartmentalized in our minds that we are able to be good humans while remaining so far removed from what ought to be the very soul of our own humanity.

"Permission has been given to those who are being fought, because they have been wronged. And indeed, Allah is competent to give them victory. Those who have been expelled from their homes without right, only because they said, 'Our Lord is Allah.'..."
[Qur'an 22:39–40]