A doctor’s kindness changed how my wife survived cancer [PODCAST]

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When a doctor shows real kindness, does it change how a patient heals? For Randy McNeely, the answer arrived the day his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and the calm, caring doctors who treated her became part of her recovery. Randy McNeely is a motivational speaker known as Captain Kindman, joined by physician advocate and physical therapist Kim Downey, who has survived cancer three times herself. This episode is based on their article “Compassionate health care transforms the patient journey,” published on KevinMD. You will hear why a doctor’s presence and reassurance can matter as much as the treatment itself. You will hear where AI helps, like a scribe that frees a doctor to spend more time with you, and what no tool can replace. And you will hear Randy’s challenge to clinicians to build a kind relationship with themselves first. Press play to hear why the people who cared for them mattered as much as the treatment, and what every clinician can do to bring that kindness back to the bedside.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today, welcome back Kim Downey, a physical therapist and a physician advocate. And we introduce Randy McNeely, otherwise known as Captain Kindman. For those who can’t see the video, he is appropriately dressed for this podcast. Together we’re going to talk about the KevinMD article, “Compassionate health care transforms the patient journey.”

Kim and Randy, welcome to the show.

Kim Downey: Thanks, Kevin.

Randy McNeely: Thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: All right, Kim, so I always ask you this first question. How did you connect with Randy, and what about his story resonated with you?

Kim Downey: Sure. We had a mutual friend on LinkedIn, Tom Dahlberg. We both commented on one of his posts, and Tom thought that we should be connected, so we did. I connect a lot of people, but sometimes people connect me as well, and I love that.

So we hopped on a call, and he shared with me the story of his wife Kimberly, who had cancer twice, and how appreciative he was to doctors. My third article that I had submitted to you, which was published just about three years ago today, was myself, like his wife, surviving multiple cancers: a tale of blessings and exceptional doctors.

When I shared that article on LinkedIn, a doctor reached out to me, and it made me happy and sad at the same time. She said that she goes to work every day sometimes not knowing if she’s making a difference, and doesn’t always feel that gratitude from patients. But she was thinking that in that article, I expressed gratitude specifically to so many of my doctors, and she was willing to borrow that and say, “I think, or hope, that some of my patients are grateful to me, too.”

So I know how much doctors appreciate thanks and gratitude, and the fact that Randy is full of thanks and kindness and gratitude for his wife who has gone through cancer. I feel like sometimes we do need hope and positivity and to share these kinds of stories, so that’s why I asked him if he’d like to collaborate.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. And Kim, hearing that story makes us as physicians realize that so much of what we do is beyond simply the diagnosis and treatment, right? It’s talking to patients and hearing their stories and offering comforting words, and that goes beyond simply what we prescribe and what tests we order.

Now, Randy, tell us a little about your story. Introduce yourself, and what made you share this particular article with Kim on KevinMD?

Randy McNeely: Well, just a quick background on me. I’m a survivor of multiple forms of childhood abuse, and my life has been shaped by the experiences I’ve had with love, with people extending love toward me, with reaching out.

There was a very dark time when I was a teenager. I thought I was going to take my life. I really wanted the pain to end. I wanted things to just be over. And my friends made a big difference. They stepped up, stepped in as kindness heroes. They extended love toward me. And so I’ve never forgotten that.

As I’ve gone through various careers, that has still been a part of my life. And so a few years ago I stepped away and stepped into promoting kindness full-time, and more recently, in the last year, it’s become honed. Why is it so important to promote kindness? Because kindness delivers love.

And this is the thing. The reason I decided to share this story about my sweetheart is because I firmly believe that love has played a big part in her healing process, and particularly the love that she’s felt from the doctors, from the nurses, the people that worked with her.

From the time we met Dr. Miller at the University of Iowa, we just felt comfortable. My wife was scared, I was scared. Cancer’s something that other people get, right? It doesn’t really hit home and become real until it’s part of your life, and the first while is just surreal. It’s like when someone you love passes away, almost. It’s like you can’t believe that this has happened. It just can’t be true, right?

But from the moment that we stepped into that hospital and met with Dr. Miller, we felt calm assurance that they were going to be our partners in working through this challenge, and we both felt peace. We felt like Dr. Miller was very kind, he was very understanding. He didn’t try to sweet talk us and tell us stuff that he knew wasn’t going to be right. I mean, he just told us straight how it was, but he said, “Listen, this is how it is, but we’ve dealt with this many times and we’ve helped many people overcome this and get through this, and we’re going to do the same for you.” And that gave us confidence, built our confidence.

Kevin Pho: Now Randy, for those who didn’t get a chance to read the story, just tell us a little bit about what happened to your wife and that first introduction with Dr. Miller. Tell us about the state both of you were in before going into that visit.

Randy McNeely: Well, yeah, that’s interesting. I have to say, my wife does not like to go to doctors. She’s just always been that way. She was moving a freezer with my daughter, and felt a twinge of pain in her leg, her right thigh. And she brushed it off as a muscle pull, and she treated it that way for like two weeks until she finally says, “You know, this is not getting any better. I’m going to have to go to urgent care.”

So she went to urgent care, and there was a great nurse practitioner there. They told her all the general things. “Oh, we’ll give you an ACE bandage, and it’s probably just a pulled muscle,” and this and this and this. But at the end she just thought, “You know.” She stopped. She was about to send my wife away, but she stopped. She says, “You know, I just have this feeling that maybe we need to schedule an MRI just to get it checked out.” We’re so grateful, so grateful that she did, that she followed that nudge that she received and told us that, because Kimberly agreed, and she went and got an MRI the next week.

Well, she got the MRI and thought, “OK, it’s going to come back as I have a pulled muscle.” And later that afternoon, like three or four hours after the MRI, we get a call from the nurse that did it, and she says, “We’ve scheduled you to meet with a specialist tomorrow to get a biopsy, because you have a mass on your leg, and we think it might be cancerous.”

To try to describe those feelings: I’m standing right there listening when the phone call comes in, and my wife is one of the calmest, sweetest people on the planet. At that time, at 28 years of marriage, I had never, not once, heard her raise her voice on the phone.

It was a first-time experience when she said, because they said they wanted to do a biopsy, and she’s like, “I’m not going up there to get a biopsy. They’re just going to poke around in there and make more damage, cause damage. Damage my muscle. It’s just a muscle pull.”

Fortunately for us, the nurse was very calm, and she said, “I can understand you feeling that way, but I can promise you Dr. Miller knows what he’s doing, and don’t you think it would be good to just make sure that everything’s going to be OK?” And her calming reassurance, again, plug for doctors, plug for nurses, her calming reassurance calmed my wife down, and she says, “OK, we’ll go.”

And of course, like I said, we went the next day. But we are coming in from a perspective of we’re scared to a degree, as everyone would be in that situation. I mean, what does this mean? She’s got cancer. Is it just there? Is it spread throughout her body? What stage is it at? All the questions that come in. And so that’s the state of mind we were in when we arrived at the doctor’s office. And again, as I stated previously, his bedside manner, his way of responding, just totally helped to relieve anxiety we felt. Of course, there were still unknowns, and there was still some anxiety, but we felt a heck of a lot better. A lot less tense, a lot less concerned than we did before.

Kevin Pho: And it’s not just relieving anxiety, right, Randy? It’s also not meeting Dr. Miller before any of this happened, and just having that demeanor from him and his team, it builds trust, right? And trust is something that is so important and foundational to the doctor-patient relationship.

Randy McNeely: Well, you know the thing that’s amazing about that, and you hit the key thing. Dr. Miller, after we got done talking to him, he felt like a friend that I’d known for a long time. And that’s just the way he came across, that’s just the feeling that he gave out. That’s what I talk about when I do my presentation, things like that, is creating that interaction experience.

It was a lived experience for us in the moment where we felt his love, we felt his caring, we felt his concern. Did he sit there and say, “Well, I love you guys”? No, he didn’t use those words, but he did. He didn’t say them, but he showed them. He showed that he cared about us, that he was concerned about us, and that he wanted to help us feel comfort and feel consoled and feel like, despite the challenge that lie ahead of us, and there was a lot of challenge ahead, we were going to make it through this.

Kevin Pho: Now, Kim, I know that you’ve shared your story multiple times on this podcast, and I’ve certainly read about your story, and you’ve had interaction with so many physicians during your own health journey as well. Talk to us specifically about that impact of kindness and how that affected you specifically as you were going in not knowing exactly where your health journey was going to lead.

Kim Downey: Well, it’s bringing tears to my eyes thinking about that and what you said after I started talking today, about how it’s like that is the healing, beyond the diagnosis. Because I’ve received a cancer diagnosis three times, and I’ve seen many doctors, and each of them, when they show up with this, we’re talking about kindness and presence and that there is room for love in health care.

And we recently did an article, right? And you got to talk to Arpav Gupta, and he’s starting a loving organization. When my doctors listen to me or just really look at me. Or one doctor once, right before I found out, or when I did find out that I had cancer for the third time, and he’s not one of my cancer doctors, but one that I rely on, and he called me with some lab results that normally he would’ve had the nurse call me with, but he just was telling me that he thinks I’m going to be OK. And he says I might, if I ever wanted to talk, to let him know. And he goes, “I might not be able to help, but I could listen.” And I was thinking to myself, “This poor guy doesn’t have time to listen to me,” but I know he would. He really would.

And I love my doctors, and I would do anything for my doctors, and that’s why I started doing all of this work: to find ways to help and support doctors. Because just like patients, doctors also need to feel seen, valued, appreciated, and loved, and that’s what we wanted to share by this article.

Kevin Pho: Now, I’m going to ask both of you the same question, and that’s the impact of artificial intelligence as part of that doctor-patient relationship. There’s been a lot of studies saying AI tools are better than doctors when it comes to diagnosis and treatment, and there are even some studies that say that these AI tools are perceived as more compassionate than physical doctors. So Kim, I’m going to ask you this. When talking to your physician, is it something that could be replaced by a robot and rapidly advancing artificial intelligence tools? Just tell us your perspective.

Kim Downey: I’d say no, no, no, no, no. And I would say that from my limited understanding of AI, where in one place it can be useful is if there could be an AI scribe that supports the doctor with their note-writing. That would be great. But also, my fear of course is that then they would be expected to see even more patients more quickly, if they say, “OK, now you have this AI scribe that’s going to take the note.” That would be horrible. So if an AI scribe can help the doctor spend more time with the patient and less time on paperwork, if that’s what really happens, then that’s OK.

And I know sometimes maybe for imaging purposes, right, if it does help, if it can be more precise, then that’s better with the patients. And if doctors can use that as a tool, that’s great. But I would never, because I think there’s been, I don’t know if it’s actually happened or if there’s been rumors of, like, in a mall, right, that you could go into some booth or something and have some kind of scan, or have that replace a doctor. And I’m like, “Absolutely not.” I want to see a doctor.

Kevin Pho: And Randy, let me ask you a similar question on that tangent. Do you think that there will ever be a time where artificial intelligence would be advanced enough to replace a human physician doing some of the things that you talked about in your story?

Randy McNeely: No. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a time when artificial intelligence can replace the connection you receive when you interact directly with a human being. I can’t sit down at my computer screen and type in words to a ChatGPT or to Claude or to whatever, or Perplexity, and see a smiling face, hear a warm, loving, caring voice, feel the vibes that are coming from them.

I can have a monologue with my computer. I can never have a dialogue, a human interaction dialogue. I’m never going to be able to read the face or the features or feel what the computer is feeling, because it is a tool. You used the right word. AI can be a fantastic tool to help doctors to be able to improve their diagnoses. I mean, you can type in and say, “Oh, these are the symptoms,” and have it spit back all this stuff in a matter of minutes, which a human being cannot do.

But it’s human beings who invented AI, and it’s human beings who will always be the ones behind it. And when it comes to doctor-patient care, there’s no piece of metal or piece of screen, whether it has thousands of letters scrolling across it or not, that’s ever going to be able to replace the personal interaction and the connection that only human-to-human interaction can bring.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Randy McNeely and Kim Downey. Randy is a patient advocate. Kim is a physical therapist and physician advocate, and together they wrote the article, “Compassionate health care transforms the patient journey.” Now I’m going to end by asking each of you just to share some take-home messages with the KevinMD audience.

Randy, why don’t you go first, and maybe add about what specific things the physicians listening to you now can do to really show that kindness to patients, especially in our environment and the current political climate, where sometimes kindness is in limited supply.

Randy McNeely: Well, the first thing that I would say to doctors, or say to anybody, is, how do you feel about yourself first? Take a look at the person in the mirror, the man or the woman in the mirror, and ask yourself, do I love me? Can I honestly say I love myself? Because the reason I say that is because if we’re having a hard time loving ourselves and thinking good things about ourselves, if the little voice in our head is constantly spewing negativity to us, it’s going to be a lot harder to reach out in love and caring and kindness to other people.

And obviously I’m not a doctor. I don’t live in that world. I’ve been in that world. I used to do HIPAA security and HIPAA privacy assessments. I’ve been to health care systems all over the United States. And I’ve seen a lot of the pressure they’re under to fill all the paperwork in, and with tools like Epic and other similar tools, they’ve got all this electronic stuff they have to fill in every day. And so I know that the pressure is tremendous.

But I would say, love yourself and love others. And remember that behind every challenging person, there is a person. There’s a human being there that deserves to be valued and appreciated. And if you’re not getting along well with yourself, take some time to assess how you can rebuild that relationship, because building that relationship with ourself is the first thing that needs to happen, and then we can more easily go out and plant love and help it grow through kindness, and help the healing process along. I firmly believe that love in the process is better than any prescription drug you can give. Now, does it substitute for that? No, but man, it sure helps a lot.

Kevin Pho: And Kim, we’ll end with you. Your take-home messages.

Kim Downey: Sure. So this morning, whether it’s a coincidence or not, because sometimes there are no coincidences, I received a text from my friend Pat Dunstan. Pat wrote a chapter in our most recent book, White Coats, Human Hearts, where I share stories of physicians, physician spouses, and physician patients. She’s a nurse who became a lawyer and had to leave because she developed Parkinson’s, and her chapter’s called “In Many Caring Hands: Rediscovering Myself in the Humanity of Doctors on My Parkinson’s Journey.”

So her chapter is a gratitude to doctors, and she’s been sending me daily inspirational messages. She met me right before my third cancer surgery. So just this morning she sent me one, and everybody loves peanuts, right? Little cute little peanuts. And it says, “Keep pouring kindness. You never know who needs a refill today.”

Kevin Pho: Love that. Kim and Randy, thank you so much for sharing your stories, time, and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Kim Downey: Thanks, Kevin.

Randy McNeely: Thanks, Kevin. We sure appreciate you.

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