How the Airline Crisis Can Help Lend Understanding to the Healthcare Crisis

(I recently posted a Twitter thread that seemed to resonate with people, so thought I’d turn it into a blog post here as well):

What is happening in the airline industry is happening in healthcare, too, only, unfortunately (for reasons that go back hundreds of years and are complex), physicians don’t have unions.

Imagine if you, as a pilot, were told you had to fly a plane in unsafe conditions.

You’d refuse and go to your union, if needed. Well, what if, (go with the metaphor here), if you didn’t fly that plane, all the passengers would die? (Imagine they have to get somewhere for lifesaving treatment, for example). And there’s no one else to fly the plane, because there’s a national shortage of pilots.

It doesn’t matter that the weather is unsafe, or you haven’t slept in 24 hours, and (in our imaginary scenario) now there’s no union to protect you. But furthermore, if you don’t do it, these hundreds of people dying will be on your conscience forever. So you put on your hero cape and you fly the plane.

Then, once you do it, you accomplish this miraculous feat, instead of acknowledging what you did, and maybe giving you a day off, everyone around you shrugs and says, well, it must not have been that hard or that dangerous, you did it easily enough (little do they know the cost to your soul it took for you to do it). So now, they say, do it again. Over and over and over. Under worse and worse and worse conditions.

That’s what healthcare is like. It was like this even before the pandemic, and is now 100-fold worse.

Nurses and doctors are quitting in droves. And killing themselves.

(read the story of Dr. Lorna Breen if you are not aware of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/nyregion/lorna-breen-suicide-coronavirus.html

She was my age).

I am not asking you to agree with me on everything. I am asking you to acknowledge my 25 years of medical experience. (10 years in training and 15 years in practice). Your “common-sense” approach does not trump this (nor come anywhere near my expertise).

I know you didn’t mean to be insulting, but I hope you can see how it did insult me. And how we are being insulted by the public over and over and over. And in some cases, physically assaulted.

I have dedicated my adult life to saving lives from cancer. It has cost my soul a lot. It was already difficult in an under-resourced, rural region. Like flying the plane through the storm with no crew and only one engine. But when you’re the only one to fly the plane, you fly the plane.

Now, the pandemic is like you’re at 35,000 feet and that one engine has cut out. How are you going to land the plane?

Like Sullenberger in the river.

But then do that every day.