When my son was in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), it felt like the end of the world. But the world did not end. Instead, my whole self was born. And I knew that I would carry this experience into the classroom.

I had been an award-winning professor for seven years before I found myself pacing the sterile aisle between cribettes on the many early morning hours when my newborn was sleeping and yet I could not. My anatomical vocabulary allowed me to speculate about diagnoses: Cyanosis likely meant a congenital heart difference. Gastroschisis, an incomplete body wall union. Babies born so prematurely, their underdeveloped lungs could be seen through the translucent window of their unvernixed skin, framed by softly forming bones even as their faces were masked by miniature CPAP machines. There were no labels. There were only tiny people.

My then 3-year-old daughter was allowed to visit on day five of our six-week stay. Her dark brown eyes were bright as maneuvered gingerly around the sensors, intravenous and peripheral lines to embrace her brother’s small body. “Look, Mommy! He has a head! Is it not he perfect?”

It was then that I realized that I had been teaching embryology wrong all along.

In health care, students are often told (implicitly or explicitly) that who they are, their many identities and lived experiences, does not matter to the work of being a doctor. That they must devalue their own selves in order to achieve medical objectivity. Clinical detachment from patients.

I am here to tell you that is not true.

You do not need to lose yourself to find your way into the shape of this profession. Medical school is hard. Sometimes, it hurts. You will be transformed. But do not let the grind sculpt away the parts of your mind, body, and spirit that health care today so desperately needs.

After years of trading mystery for mastery of the human body, you will hear stories that touch the deepest parts of you. You will face situations that challenge your beliefs. Patients will come to you, looking for an escape from their failing health, relief from the wounds of their past and pain of their present, for power over the things that rip their lives apart at the seams.

And you will realize that there is no causal relationship between being a good doctor and life being fair.

And so, you will translate the language of statistics into the language of outcomes. Because real life actually has no language of certainty.

But hope is not telling your patient how the story ends. Hope is presence. Hope is keeping pace with someone where they are, walking with them to the precipice, and helping them find the edges.

Each of us has our own examples, events that demarcate a before and an after. In medicine you will see that there is no experience that you cannot share with your patients, no fear that you cannot understand, no suffering that you cannot care about because you, too, are human. And because of this, you are enough.

Physicians often feel drained by their work because they do not know how to make an opening to receive from their patients. When you have these moments, let your patient’s stories be that offering to your own broken parts. They will take you far beyond the satisfaction of explanations. They will reveal to you other people’s realities, realities that challenge your own. Become curious about things you have been unable to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies that you had sufficiently explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions about histories you might have otherwise dismissed. In accepting these stories, you offer back the possibility of being seen and heard by someone who could hear it. And who could be changed. And who could change the world in ways that are out past their imagination’s limits.

Whatever your patients’ story, they will no longer be alone with it. And this is what allows healing to begin. This, to me, is the point of humanity in medicine.

What I mean is, when I describe pacing the NICU floor with my newborn son, you may remember a time when you treated a patient in such spaces. Or a sleepless night when your own child was sick, even with a minor illness, and know that you, too, are capable of the same fear. Or, if you do not have children, a time you lost sleep worrying about something else that was beyond your control. When I speak of my family, you may think of people you love. You may remember, or imagine, what it would feel to see them in a hospital bed. You may even tell someone or write down how my story made you feel. And in doing so, something new is made from my life and from yours. It becomes part of our interbeing and carries forward even when we part ways.

I did not share my story to prove my humanity, or my son’s, or even your own. My time in the NICU felt like the end of the world. But the world did not end.

What I offer now in the classroom and in the coaching corner is a graceful, generative presence. An understanding that there is no cure for being human, or for the messy fullness of living in a body.

That life is, indeed, a chronic condition.

My call is to hold space for humanity, for storytelling, for imagination. Hold on to what matters: the present, the past, and the future we cannot live without.

Humanity in medicine is a daily practice of collaboration. Transformation is both a calling and a creative process. And the miracle is that somehow you will take these offerings (mine, yours, your patient’s) turn them into something new, and give them back to the world.

And if that is not healing, then I do not know what is.

Kathleen Muldoon is a certified coach dedicated to empowering authenticity and humanity in health care. She is a professor in the College of Graduate Studies at Midwestern University – Glendale, where she pioneered innovative courses such as humanity in medicine, medical improv, and narrative medicine. An award-winning educator, Dr. Muldoon was named the 2023 National Educator of the Year by the Student Osteopathic Medical Association. Her personal experiences with disability sparked a deep interest in communication science and public health. She has delivered over 200 seminars and workshops globally and serves on academic and state committees advocating for patient- and professional-centered care. Dr. Muldoon is co-founder of Stop CMV AZ/Alto CMV AZ, fostering partnerships among health care providers, caregivers, and vulnerable communities. Her expertise has been featured on NPR, USA Today, and multiple podcasts. She shares insights and resources through Linktree, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and her academic work includes a featured publication in The Anatomical Record.