FM Weekly 4.42

22 January 2024

content notice for this issue: ongoing genocide in Palestine

This past week, in a strategic visioning exercise, my heart was healed in a million ways when the facilitator gently said:

“the context of this work has changed, so it is up to us to change as well.”

I think often about the circumstances that led to my decision to leave clinical practice, and whether I’ll return to it. My licenses have lapsed. My heart is still broken. I have nightmares regularly about patient care, and continue to have a nighttime panic disorder for which I take medication but still struggle mightily. It’s been 2.5 years since I was involved in patient care. It feels so far away, and like it’s never left me.

Ethics is where I came to heal. The harms, the violences, the lies, the deceit, the capitalism, the systemic injustices, the disrespect and hatred of midwifery, the heartache, the breaking point of clinical practice left me completely ragged. I have my reasons for why I was so low and so done, and I’m sure many who have also left and many who remain share in some of them. Ethics offered - and continues to offer - language about why those wrongs were so wrong, why they happened, why I could never recalibrate and keep moving despite them. Ethics gives me a language of power to leverage against a problematic clinician and to offer to patients to own their space. Healthcare alone could not give me that, maybe because it’s built without breathing room for the worker but also maybe because clinical language is void of the duality that power purposefully. Ethics is such a unique approach to addressing this work, or at least the way I want to do it, that I am finally considering whether or not to return. But it won’t be ethics that brings me back. It will be the patients.