We often underestimate the impact we can have on others, for better or worse.
It’s funny how our senses are tied to memory. To this day if I smell a cigar, it takes me back to my childhood, playing with my cousins at my grandparents’ tobacco-smoke-infused house. Or the smell of chili in the wintertime reminds me of mom’s home cooking as a kid. Neuroscientists call it the Proust phenomenon. Our sense of smell bypasses the thalamic relay and routes directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, which is why a whiff of something can drop you into a childhood memory with a vividness that a photograph never could.1
I now have a new sensory memory to add to the list: the high-pitched buzzing of a tattoo gun.
Ever since my now 20-year-old daughter was little, she and I have shared a love of music. One of our favorite songs is “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls. Late last year, she announced to me that we would be getting matching tattoos of Indigo Girls lyrics. Note that she didn’t ask, she announced. And this might come as a shock to you, dear reader, but I’m not a tattoo guy. I have never had tattoos or the desire for any tattoos. In fact, those were the arguments I laid out when I told her, “Thank you for thinking of me, but I’m absolutely not doing that.”
Two months later, we’re at the tattoo shop. “Oh boy, here we go!” I told myself as I climbed up on the table to get a matching tattoo on my arm with the following lyrics:
Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable. Lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.
Short. Succinct. Meaningful. It took about 90 minutes each, and we spent the rest of the day hanging out, talking, and grabbing dinner — definitely a core memory. Fast-forward a few weeks when she’s home for spring break and says, “Dad, I’m thinking tomorrow night we go get another matching tattoo.” Before she finished the sentence, I let out an enthusiastic “Yes!”
Wow, have things changed, all because of one person’s impact.
MORAL OF THE STORY
As family physicians, we play that same impactful role with our patients. I recently had a patient tell me about his weight-loss journey, and he said it all started with a comment I made to him about eating better. I went back and looked at my note, and I didn’t even document it because he was here that day for an acute problem. It was one of those “throwaway” statements we make with our hand on the doorknob. But it made an impact and sent him down a path of eating better and improving his health. One comment. Innocuous. Unplanned.
But this street goes both directions. Early in my career, I saw the pained look on a patient’s face when I told him a test result was “negative.” That was the desired result, but the word sounded, well, negative! The connotation of that word can diverge from the denotation. I remember an anecdotal story of a patient who thought her “triple negative” breast cancer meant the sample had been tested three times and each time showed no cancer.2 In my patient’s case, a quick “Negative is good. That’s what we want!” alleviated his concern. Now, I have it programmed into my own “system prompt” to always write something along the lines of “Your result is negative/normal.”
An impact unintended is an impact nonetheless. It’s been shown that the strength of a relationship between a physician and patient can predict how well the patient functions, both physically and mentally, over the following year.3 Strong relationships produce better outcomes.
The darkness does have an insatiable hunger. Yet for us as physicians, answering the call of lightness by bonding with our patients is worth it.
Now, who’s ready to go get that tattoo?
