I suddenly feel the need to clear something up.

Your doctor is human. A living, breathing, real-live human.

I think sometimes people forget, and they imagine their doctor should know everything. They think all the information about the human body and every single medical diagnosis (of which there are over 10,000 documented medical conditions) and the appropriate treatment plan has been downloaded into a tiny chip inserted into their doctor’s brainstem. So, when something goes wrong or their doctor doesn’t have the answers or perhaps even misses a diagnosis, they say things like, “That damn doctor!” or “Why did they send me home?” or “Didn’t they know?” or “What an idiot.” without ever stopping to consider that their doctor is human.

A living, breathing, real-live human.

I also think sometimes people imagine doctors live at the hospital. And to be honest, I completely understand this notion. As a kid, I always assumed my teachers lived at school and spent night thinking about seating charts and lesson plans while their students were away. I was genuinely shocked whenever I discovered that my sweet teacher was getting married or having a baby or when I once stumbled upon Mrs. McBride selecting lemons from the stack in the grocery store with a sticky toddler screaming in her cart. My teachers were living, breathing, real-live humans?!

Yes.

And so is your doctor.

Of course, as a doctor, I did grow up in the hospital in many ways. After growing up at home with my parents and my sister and a little more in college where I took anatomy and physiology and microbiology and organic chemistry and calculus and statistics and then even a little more when I entered medical school and stumbled through a nearly impossible version of anatomy and physiology and embryology and pharmacology and dissected each organ system down to its tiny component parts and stuffed my brain with all the knowledge I possibly could and sometimes wished I could have a little chip implanted into my brainstem with everything I needed to know…

I didn’t really grow up until I started working at the hospital. I didn’t know a single thing about life and pain and loss and grief and joy and sadness and death until I stood inside those rooms and witnessed life and pain and loss and grief and joy and sadness and death firsthand.

None of us did.

We were so young. We had all this science-y knowledge from that endless parade of “ologies,” and we thought we were ready! But we didn’t really have a clue. We were astonished by real LIFE happening right before our eyes in the hospital.

At the very same time, outside of the hospital, we got married and had children and lost loved ones and struggled financially and tried to parent sticky toddlers screaming in our grocery cart and came to work with migraines or horrible periods and delivered our spouse to drug rehab and pondered divorce and struggled through our very own astonishing lives.

Because we are living, breathing, real-live humans!

More than anything, I want you to know your doctor genuinely cares about you. They want to help you. They truly want to make you well.

I promise, there isn’t a hidden breakroom somewhere where all the doctors sit around sipping lattes and talking about our golf game and chuckling condescendingly about our clueless patients waiting in exam rooms or what we didn’t tell them about their diagnosis and how we’re all just trying to feed Big Pharma and ruin everyone’s lives.

No.

Instead, we weep over your cancer diagnosis. Your particular name echoes through our mind for months after we tell you what we’ve found. We leave the clinic or the hospital and drive to pick our children up from daycare and try to get everyone to soccer practice on time and wonder what to make for dinner. But really, we keep thinking about Meridith’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and ‘I wonder how Scott’s echocardiogram turned out?’ and the phone call we need to make about Maureen’s lab results first thing tomorrow. We worry. And we stew. We take all your beautiful, terrible stories deep into our hearts, and we carry them the only way we know how.

We love you. And we care so deeply about you.

Because we are living, breathing, real-live humans.

It’s time to do this astonishing life—and our very own health and healing—together.

As humans.