A Gutsy Guide to Getting Your Mojo Back

Who’d have thunk that I’d have to study more, after twelve years of medical education? Don’t get me wrong. I knew I’d have to put in my CME hours (continuing medical education). I’d like to say I read all of my journals, but truth be told, I only read some of them, cherry picked for the articles that tickle my fancy of the day. (We do get LOTS of journals). I know it’s important to stay abreast of medical research, so I study all the annual articles the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology sends me every year, not just the ones you have to read to keep up your board certification. This scheduled maintenance of professional development is key. After all, you don’t want us doctors to get all slack on you.

But I’ve discovered that this is not enough to keep me growing as a physician. Whether or not calcium supplementation helps to prevent severe preeclampsia (it appears not to) fails to delve deeper into my ultimate goal- becoming a better physician. I’m not just talking about improving my doctor book-learning. Well, I guess that’s not entirely true, since I’m reading a lot of books, but they’re not the kind of books you might imagine. The books I’m reading are gently and lovingly encouraging me to be a different kind of doctor, maybe even a healer.

I started by reading Anne Lamott, who I now affectionately term Annie, as if she’s my oldest friend from high school and we regularly have tea on Tuesdays. I wish. But Annie’s books allow you so deeply into her inner world that you feel like you know her. I hadn’t read any of Anne Lamott’s books until I was writing the last two chapters of I Don’t Do Men: Confessions of an OB/GYN. So when Barbara summed up my book as “Elizabeth Gilbert and Anne Lamott, but with lots of vaginas,” I couldn’t have been more delighted if someone had given me the Pulitzer Prize. It’s as if I had channeled Annie without ever knowing her work. I just read the first of her books in March, and since then, I’ve steadily plowed my way through most of them- Operating Instructions, Bird By Bird, Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and now, Grace (Eventually). It’s impossible to pick favorites- it would be like Sophie’s choice- but if a Nazi forced me to, I might have to choose Operating Instructions, if for no other reason than I am a new mother and an obstetrician, and the book is a memoir about her son’s first year. Touching, honest, revelatory, and funny as hell, Operating Instructions was the second book I read and the first of her books I started giving away regularly to women about to have a baby. It’s hard enough to be home with an infant, peering all to frequently inside your own spazzy brain, without feeling like you’re the only woman who ever wondered what possessed her to think becoming a mother was a good idea. Annie makes me feel less alone, in questioning faith, in hating the Mommy fanny pack that has taken up residence where my waist used to be, in seeking joy and beauty in strange and mysterious places. If I can learn some of this skill from her, the ability to make a complete stranger feel less alone, more inspired, imagine what I might be able to do with my patients!

And then there’s Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. This book is such a runaway bestseller that to say I love this book makes me a cliché. But I’ll say it anyway. I love this book. Talk about making you not feel alone. I recommend this book to everyone who has ever been through a divorce, a career change, a life transition, a loss, or a time of painful self-reflection. Isn’t that all of us? I devoured the first half of this book in about 24 hours and then I took the rest of the month to finish it because I didn’t want it to end. I would glance at it on my nightstand, tempted to pick it up, to catch up with my old friend Liz, but I didn’t want to say goodbye to her, so as long as she lay on my nightstand, I felt a connection, as if someone else understood me. So there it is again, that beautiful sense of being gotten, that somebody sees your quirks and insecurities and not only understands but loves you all the more for what makes you uniquely human. If I can impart this to my patients, if I can make them feel just a wee bit the way Liz Gilbert makes me feel, won’t they be in a better place to heal, to be well?

You might be wondering why I’m reading Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert as part of my medical education, but you have to understand- they didn’t teach us any of this stuff in twelve years of book-learning. We learned organic chemistry and psychopharmacology and Mendelian genetics and journal club statistics, but nobody taught us how to help people from the inside out. I always assumed they would teach us the art of medicine when I went to medical school. How to intuit illness, how to touch someone’s spirit, how to heal. I never realized I had been trained to be merely a technician of the human body, like a good mechanic. Instead, I bought into the indoctrination, not questioning it, not demanding more. I graduated second in my class, won awards and membership in honor societies, and got accepted to a fabulous OB/GYN residency program at Northwestern University, where the black-and-white thinking prospered, while I stayed in my box.

Thoughts of enlightenment, spiritual awakening, and holistic healing never even occurred to me then. The closest I came was the yoga class I took at my gym. For the first ten minutes of the hour-long class, we breathed, big breath in through your head, big breath out from your heart. Breathe in, breathe out. I’m good at following instructions, so I breathed in and out, but after a few minutes, my brain started racing, yelling, screaming at me. “When are we gonna get some exercise! We only have one friggin’ hour this whole week to exercise, and you gonna sit here and breathe?” My flexible ballet dancer’s body caught on to the poses easily, but the breathing part? I sucked. After that one class, I swore off yoga and switched back to step aerobics.

When it comes to being a physician with an open mind towards holistic healing, I grew up with one giant strike against me- my Dad. A physician trained in the classic Western medicine style (which means lots of academics, very little intuition, and loads of scorn for anything you don’t understand), Dad made fun of any medical modality that didn’t fit neatly into his black leather medical bag. On the flip side, I had Aunt Trudy, the only hippie I knew before I moved back to California when I was thirty years old. Trudy wore muumuus, talked about “making space” for people, traveled to Santa Fe often, and believed there were crystals in our feet that needed to get broken up. Trained as a psychologist, Trudy practiced sand play therapy, with an office decked out with a sand box and lots of toys and figurines you could arrange in a particular order, which could help Trudy analyze your psyche. She cut out articles from magazines for me and bought me books about art and medicine when she found out I was passionate about painting. When her young son, my concert cellist cousin Corry, committed suicide, Trudy sought solace from a Christian psychic, who helped her communicate with her beloved son and helped her learn to stop blaming herself.

While Dad loved his brother’s funky, nutty wife, he harassed her constantly, for believing in “all that crap.” Trudy must have believed Dad needed healing most of all, since he returned from most visits to her house with various forms of holistic remedies. For months, the top of our refrigerator sported some stinky mushroom tea that Trudy swore would help Dad with his multiple sclerosis, and she tried really hard to let her work on the crystals in his feet. When Dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Aunt Trudy called me, conspiratorially, about launching a full-out intervention to get Dad on a macrobiotic diet, in addition to a host of other holistic health remedies that might help him. She knew it would be a tough sell, and it was. The minute I mentioned a macrobiotic diet, Dad ordered spicy chicken wings and an ice cream sundae.

When I was young, all the healing mumbo-jumbo struck me as a bit odd. I wasn’t sure about the stinky mushroom tea, and while I liked foot rubs, I wasn’t sure they could cure Dad’s neurological condition. But I adored my wacky aunt and her special yarn-braided art creations and her soul-driven musings and her exploring spirit. While the other members of the Rankin clan droned on about world politics or the best new SUV or what was happening in the Florida Conference (Trudy’s husband- my Uncle Larry- was a Methodist minister, of all things), Trudy would ask me about my feelings. After living in Costa Rica, where she and Larry were involved in missionary work, Trudy grew to love ethnic art and music, and when I became an artist, we had even more to talk about. The more I aged, the more curious I became about the things she believed- the mushroom tea and the psychic and the crystals. But my Dad never created an environment that left me feeling supported in my growing curiosity. I didn’t feel safe confessing my feelings to Dad, since he might have made fun of me the way he did when I tried to learn Spanish and he mocked my bad accent. Plus, I got wrapped up in my own self-centered life and never took the time to explore the inner-workings of Aunt Trudy.

Other than Aunt Trudy, no one ever exposed me to anything mystical, transformative, or healing outside the box of academic medicine. If it couldn’t be tested with a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, it didn’t exist, as far as I was concerned. The only exception was God, who I couldn’t prove but believed, nontheless. But even God was housed in a boxy church, with enrobed preachers and a dutiful congregation. My religious upbringing didn’t allow much room for a God who inhabits strange guises. While I knew there were psychics, who wrapped their heads in turbans and surrounded themselves with crystals, I didn’t know about medical intuitives or energy medicine or shamanic journeys. I had heard of acupuncture, envisioning it as some sort of Chinese torture device, but I had never heard of naturopathy or feng shui or reiki therapy.

But I think we missed something in our medical training by ignoring these modalities of healing. I only recently began thinking outside my doctor box, the one that told me that these things were, if not a bunch of bunk, not practitioners I wished to include in my treatment plans. Now, that has changed. I took a five-day writing workshop at Esalen Institute in Big Sur with a fabulous teacher, Nancy Aronie. I live near Esalen, and for years, I had been feeling its draw, but aside from touring the grounds and spending my wedding night in their hot springs at 1am, when the public is allowed to visit, I had never experienced Esalen I finally indulged the magnetic allure and took the writing workshop because, of all the fabulous workshops available, that one sounded the least scary. I wasn’t quite ready for Tantric Sexuality or Vision Seekers (although now, that sounds kind of fun!) When I arrived, a whole slew of wonderful, mysterious things happened (they’re described in I Don’t Do Men) that inspired me to veer off the traditional path and learn more about how to become a healer. If only I could combine what I learned from Anne Lamott and Elizabeth Gilbert and mix it in with what others have learned about healing outside of the box, maybe I could do something really beautiful with my life.

At Esalen, I met many holistic health providers. And not only were they happier than any of the doctors I know these days, it seems that maybe they are even healing people, more than we are. I’m not talking about curing your urinary tract infections. We doctors do just fine with that. But so many chronic conditions plague my patients- endometriosis, infertility, chronic pelvic pain, irritable bowel syndrome. And we have so little in our doctor box that can truly help these women. Yet, these holistic practitioners seem to have accepted something critical-the mind-body connection. Plus, they’re listening and touching and honoring people, in a way we doctors find it hard to do in 7 1/2 minutes of a busy managed care practice. I found myself wishing I had studied acupuncture. Don’t get me wrong- I’ve got a lot of good tricks in my doctor box. But I think that’s only a piece of the puzzle. It shouldn’t have to be either/or. Why can’t Western trained doctors work in concert with holistic healers, as partners, rather than as competitors. It’s thrilling, really. And what if I saw fewer patients, made less money, and spent more time listening, inspiring, and holding space for these women who come to me, wanting to be whole?

So now I’m reading everything I can find that’s written by an MD who has climbed out of the traditional doctor box and explored another path. Judith Orloff’s Intuitive Healing, Christiane Northrup’s Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, and Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings are the first books I raced through. I’m also exploring How Doctor’s Think, by Jerome Groopman, and Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance. And I just read Kris Carr’s fabulous Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips. But more on all of those later…

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