Resident devotional # 3: Love your patient as yourself

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 26:35-40 NIV

And so we come back here. The correct answer. Why are you a doctor? To take care of patients, obviously.

I remember the first time I shadowed in the emergency room, as a young college student with stars in her eyes. I still remember one of the patients I saw. She was a 65-year-old woman, married and well-off, who had just come back from a cruise around the Mediterranean Sea with her husband. She had fallen ill while on the cruise, and had subsequently been taken to a hospital in one of the countries, where they had dutifully done a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis. They sent her back to the US, and to our emergency room, with those scans to look at, and to the emergency medicine attending and resident who were on her case, it was obvious that she had metastatic cancer. I remember that the attending and resident, when they discussed this result, took maybe about 5 seconds of awkward silence to acknowledge the crushing weight of this diagnosis. Then they moved on to the next patient and the next emergency, and I followed them, thinking of that lady all the while.

As a college student, and then as a medical student, seeing patients was exciting. One of my best memories of medical school was the first day of third year, when I realized that I would finally get to go to the hospital and treat people every single day. But then things got hard. I became an intern on VA nights, and I would start my night by going from workroom to workroom, collecting lists of patient names, eventually totaling up to 40 or 50 patients per shift. Before long, the patients became identified less as people than as problems — the heart failure patient, the toe amputation patient (another one!), the patient whose family was hard to talk to. And in the midst of rounding and orders and presentations and long shifts, it became easier to see the patients as tasks on a list of to-dos rather than real people with real problems.

As a doctor, you almost have to depersonalize to some extent. After all, you hear so many sad stories and see so many people, and are often so tired from long hours, that the sad stories don’t impact you as much as they did when you were a shadow, on the outside looking in. It can be tempting to take patients for granted, to ignore the patient whose relative has yet another question, to pass that one last order for a patient onto the night team. But in our verse today, Jesus says that one of the two greatest commandments in the Bible is to love your neighbor as yourself — to give other people the same treatment that you would like for yourself.

How would you feel if you came into the emergency room with a diagnosis like cancer, the kind that completely rocks your world, and the first doctor you talked to treated you as if you were an afterthought and completely ignored your feelings? How would you feel if your mother, father, grandparent, or best friend was in the hospital fighting for their life, and if their doctor “forgot” to check on them, or to put in a vital order because it was the end of their shift? Would you not want the best care possible for your loved ones and for yourself?

Your patients aren’t just patients; they are humans, just like you are. You may not be able to do everything or be perfect for the patient every single time, but that’s not what Jesus asks. He asks you to love your patients, to see them like you would see yourself in that situation. In John 13:34, he ramps this up by giving the command to love people like He loves people. Of course, He loved people so much that even though He was in heaven, being worshiped continually by the angels, He came down to earth and took our position as a human, even humbling himself to death so that we could be saved from sin and be loved by Him forever!

If we are going to reflect Jesus in our workplace as doctors, we must not only be committed to treating patients, but to loving them just like Jesus loves us.