It’s a Tall Order, but Love Your Patients. (My January EMN column.)

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This can be a tall order. Human beings are remarkably difficult to love. They are often angry, uncommunicative, cruel, manipulative, and dishonest. (And that’s just the doctors!) Humans resist love almost as fiercely as they desire it. They push one another away with profanity. They anger each other with attitude. They pick until someone lashes out. They remind us of our own human frailty.

So how do we do it? How do we love these people, especially when they come to us in the chaos of our work in the ED? How do we love them when we are weary and they have strange complaints at 2 a.m.? How do we love them when, despite our suggestions on all of their previous visits, they continue to ignore our advice, not take their prescriptions, and not change their lifestyles? Can we love them at all?

It depends. Do you think that loving them means having warm emotions for them? Do you think it means feeling good about them? Or is it having a satisfying relationship with them? If so, loving will be difficult. Because we in the modern West have excised and biopsied, reconstructed and deconstructed the word love until it is nearly unrecognizable.

We want love to be a feeling we have, when in fact, love must be an action we show. When our children are loud and disobedient, when they scream and throw tantrums, it’s often difficult to feel good about them. But we still feed them, bathe them, sing to them, and put them to bed with kisses in hope of a better day or after the terrible twos or threatening threes or whichever phase has passed. (Lately it’s the sarcastic seventeens, but I digress.)

Whatever we feel about the angry drunk, the manipulative attorney, the entitled college student, the addicted gang-banger, when we behave with competence, when we do what is right, and seek their best, we show love for them. A love borne of action, not emotion. A love that is in some ways more steady and true.

I’ve learned that a cycle is born. When I act toward them with competence, I show them love. And when I do that, I learn in time to see them less as numbers (or annoyances) and more as people. A crazy thing then happens; they love me back. And then the magic happens.

I talk to them, and they talk to me. And we come together. I ask about their family, and they ask about mine. I inquire about why they are sad, and they tell me things that shake me to the core and remind me of how I have nothing to complain about when held up to their life story of abuse and addiction, neglect and loss. And because I listen (and sometimes hug them or pray for them), they know I’m human, too. And they come to love me.

In time, you’ll find new, wonderful ways to love. Over the years I’ve learned that everyone wants to hear how beautiful her baby is. I tell her. Because every baby is, if only to her own parents. And they say thank you, and I tell them how blessed they are. And we joke about children. The children then look at me, smile, and reach for me to hold them, and I am the recipient of the blessing.

I’m less and less bothered by little things. I like to get warm blankets, and I like to get cups of water. Yes, I still get annoyed when I’m busy, but I’m a work in progress, you see. If I can order a snack for them, I will. We have a wonderful time when it’s slow and I can sit and hear a life story or tell a joke. And the love grows. By acting in love, love increases.

Love isn’t taught in the classroom, and the boards certainly don’t measure it. It is nigh impossible to apply evidence-based evaluations to love. But once you allow it to start and carry you forward, your heart will thaw like the Winter Warlock and grow like the Grinch.

And your satisfaction scores will probably go up, too.