Join host Dr. Jonathan Weinkle and guest Abbe Feitelberg on Healing People, Not Patients as she shares her journey with Crohn's disease, patient advocacy, and leadership in healthcare. Discover how personal experiences with chronic illness can foster self-efficacy, build authentic partnerships between patients and providers, and tie into themes of persistence and celebration like the holiday of Purim.
Can patient advocacy and persistence lead to "bonus days" in chronic illness?
In Episode 10 of Healing People, Not Patients, Abbe Feitelberg, a healthcare leader and Crohn's disease advocate, discusses her 10-year path to diagnosis, the loneliness of navigating healthcare alone, and her work with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation. Drawing from her professional role training clinicians in leadership and her personal "bonus days" after a life-threatening flare, she explores building team-based care, listening actively to patients, and seeing them as whole people. Abbe connects her story to Purim, emphasizing hidden strengths, self-advocacy, and honest partnerships for better outcomes.
Top 3 Takeaways:
About the Guest:
Abbe Feitelberg is the Chief People Officer for a multi-site healthcare company focused on interventional psychiatry, based in Colorado. A former public defender with a law degree, she has transitioned into healthcare leadership, training physicians and teams to improve patient experiences and outcomes. Diagnosed with Crohn's disease after a decade of misdiagnosis, she has 30+ years of personal experience managing chronic illness. Abbe is deeply involved with the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation, raising funds through endurance events like half marathons, cycling, and hiking Machu Picchu, while advocating for legislative reforms on step therapy and prior authorizations. She is also an avid cyclist, photographer, traveler, and longtime friend of the host.
Healing People, Not Patients explores ways to enhance medical practice by infusing it with compassion, humanity, and a deeper sense of purpose, aiming to help healthcare professionals rediscover the "soul" of their work. Framed around the four questions of the Passover Seder, it probes how to transform medicine for the better, promoting an empathetic and supportive approach that empowers patients to create meaningful, sober lives, while drawing on Jewish teachings about community and friendship.
"Our theme song, "Room for the Soul," is available on Bandcamp at https://jonathanweinkle.bandcamp.com/track/room-for-the-soul."
Dr. Jonathan Weinkle is an internist and pediatrician who practices primary care at a community health center in Pittsburgh. He strives to be a "nice Jewish doctor" focused on patient-centered healthcare, emphasizing effective communication and holistic well-being.
He teaches the courses, “Death and the Healthcare Professions” and “Healing and Humanity” at the University of Pittsburgh, authored the books Healing People, Not Patients and Illness to Exodus, and runs ‘Healers Who Listen’, where he blogs on healing and Jewish tradition. Once an aspiring rabbi, he now integrates faith and medicine to support other physicians and his own patients.
🌐 Website: healerswholisten.com
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathan-weinkle-3440032a
📸 Instagram: @HealersWhoListen
📘 Facebook: @JonathanWeinkle
[00:00:00] If you're listening on release day, it's the Jewish holiday of Purim. Happy Purim. Purim celebrates the Jews' narrow escape from destruction in ancient Persia. According to the classic Jewish formula of they tried to kill us, they didn't succeed. Let's eat. Except this time there's a lot more revelry, silly costumes, even more sweets than usual, and a ton of noise making.
So I'm not a huge costume guy, but one year from my med school talent show, I did pretend to throw a tantrum in the middle of MCing. The show stormed off and came back and Kermit the Frog costume to sing Rainbow Connection. It was December, 2000 before cell phones and social media. So the only video evidence of this was on a grainy VHS tape.
So you'll just have to believe me . My guest for this occasion is my friend Abby Heidelberg, who I've known for more than 30 years, and who loves the Muppets as much as I do, and who apropos Purim is a very funny person. We'll talk about our experiences as a person with chronic [00:01:00] illness, as a patient advocate, and as a healthcare leader working on the business side of healthcare to do what I'm doing from the clinical side, trying to get closer to delivering the care that the person we're treating needs from us.
What does that have to do with Purim? Tell you at the end.
Welcome back everyone.
I'm really pleased this evening to have. An old and a very dear friend who I haven't seen in a long time. Abby Heidelberg. Abby and I have known each other since 1990. we'll leave it at that when I was her camp counselor. And actually some experiences we had helping Abby get through some minor and somewhat major medical crises at summer camp actually led.
In part to me applying to med school. So, she was right there at the origin of all of this. But today she is now the chief people officer for a multi-site healthcare company and spends a lot of the time that she is at work training healthcare professionals like myself to be good leaders. And in turn then they go on as good [00:02:00] leaders to develop good patient experiences, integrated healthcare systems.
And really lead to better patient outcomes, which is, what we're all doing. So despite the fact that Abby went to law school and I went to medical school we're working on the same team. She's also on a lot of other teams though. she's an avid cyclist, a photographer, traveler, and an individual with a lot of chronic health conditions, including Crohn's disease, which is where we're gonna start talking because that experience has led you to.
Maybe the most important team that you play on, which is the Crohn's Colitis Foundation. And I reached out to you originally because I wanted to hear about your advocacy work. So get us started and tell us what you do in that space and how you got into it in the first place. Yeah, so really what I do with Team Challenge in the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation is raising funds, raising awareness, and doing that with some, frankly, kind of absurd.
Physical activities a lot of half marathons, a lot of times cycling. this [00:03:00] fall I'm gonna be hiking the trail to Machu Picchu. But the big goal with all of that is to raise funds for better treatments in a cure, for Crohn's and colitis and really raising awareness. And some of that is legislative advocacy.
So spending time in Washington DC advocating for step therapy bills and reform in that space. and then also locally here in Colorado, within the prior authorization space for some legislation. That's really important, not only to make sure I can get my medications, but also make my treatment provider's world an easier place to be, that they're not constantly fighting in circles.
And I do all of that because I've been really fortunate to have people help me understand my journey and understand my Crohn's disease and be a team for me. I wanna make sure that if I can avoid any other person having to be where I've been with my Crohn's disease, that I do that for them . And you mentioned when we were talking [00:04:00] earlier about you used the word just now understanding, and it sounds like your Crohn's disease was misunderstood for a very long time.
I started getting sick when I was a senior in high school, so that was late nineties. At that time, I think Crohn's disease was still largely perceived as something that impacted older people. It didn't impact kids. It certainly didn't impact, young, healthy women who played sports and were super active and did all of those things.
And so I had my gallbladder removed at that time and was just really sick after that. And was really sick. Whether I ate, whether I didn't eat a lot of symptoms that didn't make sense. And all of the providers that I saw. Either told me I had an eating disorder or that I'd eaten something I shouldn't have because I didn't have my gall bladder anymore .
the surgeon that ended up taking my appendix out 10 years later asked me what I was doing for my Crohn's disease. And it was honestly the first time I'd ever heard that word. And I was home for the next eight [00:05:00] weeks because that surgery set off a really nasty flare and I found the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation and I found all these resources and suddenly.
The last 10 years of my life made sense. All of these little pieces and all of these symptoms and all of these things fit together in a way that was scary because all I kept reading was there is no cure. But it also felt like there are people out there that understand this even if they can't cure it.
And there are support resources for me as a patient. And then there are all of these researchers and doctors that are spending their entire work days looking for a cure. That felt really powerful to me . That is amazing because it sounds from the first 10 years of your experience, like it would be very easy to feel like you had kind of been left on your own to fend for yourself.
I talk a little bit in the book that you're about to read. Thank you very much for mentioning that. But there's this. Image [00:06:00] in the Bible about the outstretched arm of God, you know, and fighting to free, the Israelites slaves in Egypt. And they interpret that in a lot of places as being like the sword the battle that.
Someone does on your behalf. And I think of that when I'm practicing medicine, like I'm going in to fight for this person whether I'm fighting against the disease or I'm fighting against their social determinants of health. And sometimes I'm fighting against an insurance company or another doctor who isn't listening to them or a relative that's getting in the way, who knows who I'm fighting against.
I sometimes, I don't know myself, but. It is a really lonely feeling to feel like you've gotta do all the fighting yourself. It is lonely, it is hard. and I think particularly being diagnosed as an adult those appointments when I was 17 were the first doctor's appointments I really went to by myself.
but my parents still had to sign all the paperwork and so. Being sick in college, being sick in law school, being sick as a young practicing attorney, I had to figure all [00:07:00] of that out myself, and I had to figure out insurance and how do I get a referral and how do I find out if this doctor is a good doctor and it's going to engage with me the way that I want a mead.
And if he's not, how do I find a new one? All of these things that felt really big and really intimidating while also just trying to be. 25, 26 years old and practice law and do all of the things that I really wanted to do in my life. It was a lot and sometimes it felt like it was too much.
And so learning how to do that and learning how to advocate for myself really allowed me to surround myself with people that would advocate with me advocate with me. I really like that phrase because I think it knocks me down a peg a little bit because I've had a lot of patients say, and I've also had myself and a lot of colleagues say, I need someone to advocate for me.
And you did a couple of things there. One is that [00:08:00] you've held onto some of the agency instead of handing it all over. So I'm advocating I need you to advocate with me. And also the sense that you're not, powerless, that recognizing you had agency in the first place and keeping it for yourself.
But it's really easy for people in my position to kind of get real full of ourselves. Although this person can't do it, I have to do it for them. We're not currently a team, I think we should be a team. How do you, whether it's in your advocacy work or in your professional life, how do you teach people that kind of, first of all, self-efficacy, but also that kind of partnership?
I think having started my career as a public defender, I had to learn to listen, and I had to learn to ask a question, not because I was anticipating the answer. Because I needed the answer and I needed the person that I was talking with, whether that was my client or their family [00:09:00] or another witness, I needed them to understand that what they said mattered.
and it mattered not only for how I moved forward, but it mattered for the decisions that they were gonna have to make . And so I think learning to listen and learning to ask the right questions part of what. I do professionally now when I'm working, largely within the interventional psychiatry space, is helping our physicians understand you might know everything.
Everyone else that works with you and all of your patients don't. And so you have to be willing to hear their questions for what they're really asking. You have to be willing to ask for more if you don't understand. And it's okay to say, I don't understand your question. Can you help me? You have to be willing to do all of those things and not be too busy or too important, or I've been here long enough that I know what you're asking before it even comes out of your [00:10:00] mouth And so I think helping people engage in a way that everyone understands that what they're doing matters to what everyone else is doing.
Really allows people to take that pause and hear. And then I think just personally, it's being okay to ask the question. And there's a lot that, I do professionally that is not innate to me personally, that I've had to kind of transition that to be able to say No, I don't understand the information you're giving me, or can you tell me more?
Or can you help me understand where I can do something differently or better or more or less that's going to increase the likelihood that this works and decrease the likelihood that I'm sitting in your office again in six weeks.
that's great. As you may know, I'm really a big fan of asking questions and letting somebody else teach me. You mentioned that the company you're working with right now is an interventional psychiatry provider. That seems like a maybe kind of a unique space. What are some of the challenges [00:11:00] that both for the practitioners but also for the patients?
First of all, just getting into that space in and of itself because. I know from my own experience in primary care, it's not easy. The challenges that people have had to go through to get there in the first place and then to get what they need once they're there. And then the challenges of providing them with that of creating, as you said, this patient, outcome driven, welcoming space.
I think the biggest challenge is someone, from what I see from the patient side. Which plays into how they engage with our providers once they get to us is feeling comfortable telling their current treatment provider This medication isn't working or it isn't working well enough. Or being able to say straight away, I don't wanna start with medication.
There's lack of other things right now that are available to people. Unfortunately, we're seeing the insurance companies. Being more willing to give authorization for those things as a frontline treatment because the clinical data is there. [00:12:00] And so I think when we can have somebody that is comfortable saying that, and again, that goes back to that advocacy and that agency space of not letting somebody else dictate your care journey I think really helps.
I think the challenge for our providers, once the patients. Come to us as frequently. It's a patient that's in crisis, like they're having a profound mental health challenge at that moment, and they need help at that moment because it's a mental health challenge. They're not always able to articulate that.
And so having the ability to see someone and understand their nonverbal cues, even if you don't have this really lengthy relationship with them, and be able to engage them in a way that even in an initial consult, they're comfortable telling you what's happening in a very transparent way so you can help them.
It doesn't mean everybody, gets the treatment that they think they want straight away. It means that they're comfortable seeing what isn't working right now and what they're experiencing right now so that [00:13:00] someone can help them. I'm gonna ask a question that maybe my colleagues don't want to hear, but what are some of the barriers
That the clinicians have in providing that for them.
I think a lot of our clinicians feel that if a patient comes in and asks for something it maybe isn't okay to push back on it. So if you have a patient who comes in and wants to start with a Ketamine versus TMS, even though TMS they know might be more effective as that first line treatment.
it's a little bit of the dollars and cents, but it's also a little bit of that, like patient satisfaction NPS space, that net promoter space of, if I put something else on the table that isn't what the patient asks for, are they gonna go somewhere else where they're gonna get that treatment that they've heard of or that they think is the right thing for them?
And so, am I losing dollars? I'm sure $5 outta my pocket as a provider, or is that dollars outta a company's pocket? [00:14:00] And am I gonna get, a negative Google review about that? Because I didn't do right what they wanted. And that's the worst thing, the worst patient outcome of all is the negative Google Review.
I wonder. And there's only one right, that this is a book that I probably brought up two or three times already in this short run of my podcast. But reading a book recently about secondary traumatic stress, and the author describes a patient encounter that he had with a new patient who had
Either left or been dismissed from multiple other trauma practices. And after about three visits, the patient said, I had heard all these great things about you and I just wanna say you're nothing special. And he kind of described this. Countertransference type reaction of just that, that made him really angry.
there was an old article years ago that ran called, which I would never title anything like this or use this concept, but the article was called in 1978, the Hateful Patient. But it wasn't that they were people who deserved to [00:15:00] be hated. It was that they aroused hateful, like distasteful feelings in the clinicians.
Mm-hmm. And one of those feelings actually turns out to be this like. Puffing yourself up, like, oh, this person has been, very disappointed in all their previous providers. I'll be different. And then the ego takes over and you've gotta show them that you're the better clinician then all of these other people who failed to treat them.
And I know when you're going to interventional psychiatry, it's because you've gone through all of the different psychotherapies and oral medications and have. Refractory depression, crippling anxiety, PTSD, that can't seem to resolve any other way. You're teaching physician leadership, is that a problem that you've run into?
So I'm really, still kind of new with my organization. Mm-hmm. But all of the clinicians that I have been fortunate to interact with are hungry for them . They are hungry for someone to. Help them give feedback to their colleagues to [00:16:00] help them learn how to engage a team. I was chatting with our chief medical officer about one of our providers down in Texas, who is kind of the persona of what I wanna see.
So when I think about physician recruiting, when I think about who do I want in my clinics, it is this individual and it is. Because they're never going to be the reason that a patient care tech who is doing a lot of that hands-on treatment with TMS and things like that, they're never gonna be the reason that PCT leaves, but they will absolutely be the reason that PCT stays.
And if I can get my providers to understand that and understand the role that they play there, but also understand like. That person supports your work. 'cause then you are not doing TMS, That's not where you are spending your time. You can have that six week check in with your patient to catch it before something goes wrong.
Even if all you do is talk about baseball for 10 minutes. Right. You can do [00:17:00] those things because you've gotten this person who is part of your team and you trust and you rely on and feels valued. And that's really what I'm driving to when I think about physician leadership development and that.
It came to me in a very different way when I worked at DaVita, was working with some of our medical directors in our clinics to run their monthly facility health meeting was how do you run this meeting? How do you engage your team? Because this directly hits your patient metrics.
When you think about your CMS goals and you think about all these things, if you're doing this in the right way, you are getting the information you need to make a difference. Yeah, That's really nice. And does that sort of reflect on the relationships they have with their patients as well?
It does. I think if their patients are engaging with a provider who isn't stressed, isn't anxious, isn't fighting, if they're doing telehealth, they're not fighting with Zoom, they know that their patients when they come in, have a team that is welcoming to them. [00:18:00] Everybody is showing up to those appointments, whether they're in person or telehealth in a less anxious way, so you're not adding stress to an already.
Potentially like high strung situation. You're making it so everyone can do what they're there to do without adding these other dynamics. That's awesome. You had told me a story earlier about bonus days. And when you first said the word and then you moved on, you didn't tell me the story initially.
I thought you were talking about like that you hadn't used your PTO and you had racked up all of this time off, but that's not what you meant. nope. I have had 16 years of bonus days this month. And that was 16 years ago. I was admitted to the hospital and did not leave that hospital for 28 days.
I spent a good amount of that time actually in a bone marrow transplant room because I had no immune system. My bone marrow had shut down, my liver was failing from a Crohn's flare and a medication [00:19:00] complication and adding steroids to the mix. And I had all sorts of doctors in and out of that room.
My GI was doing the best he could with what he saw, but he didn't know what it was. And they called hematology oncology and he came in and the very real conversation was, we don't know how to fix this and we have some things we're gonna try, but we don't know if you go home. And that was really terrifying for me.
Part of what was happening was I also had brush. And so I couldn't communicate very clearly 'cause it was starting in my mouth and running down my digestive tract. And so everything was coming out very jumbled and I was on a lot of pain medication. And so I was hearing things that made sense, but they weren't coming out the same way.
And being asked to repeat myself consistently was just making me angry. And so all these questions that I was trying to ask, I had to just have them write everything down so [00:20:00] I could text my family out of state. My dad came in for a weekend to try to get all the doctors to finally talk to each other before they called in hematology oncology.
Like I had been telling them I have bloody nose. And they all just kept ignoring it. And it was because I had no immune system and I wasn't clotting like all these things were happening. And when I finally left that hospital, it was not necessarily because it was the day I was supposed to go home.
It was 'cause I think my GI was tired of my asking every day, can I go home today? And he finally said, you can go home today on antibiotics and you cannot go to work. And these are the parameters that you can go home today. I made a really conscious choice that all of these doctors and all of these nurses and all of these LPNs and CNAs had worked so hard so I could go home, that I was really determined to make every day after that count.
And so I really do think of those as bonus days, and I hope that I [00:21:00] make them count . That's amazing. Well, I certainly think the people at the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation feel that way. I hope that your organization recognizes that too. I recognize that because I don't know if you remember, but we had a series of conversations about a year after that when I was going through a rough patch, and I don't think I knew this story.
And you were being very generous with your time to getting over the hump for something that was a lot less difficult than what you had gone through. Without getting into my details , I'd appreciate that. I think I am very guarded around that narrative. I have a friend that was like, you just glossed right over that one.
I think I don't ever want to be defined by the things I have, and I like word choice is very intentional from you. So I will never say that I suffer from Crohn's disease. Mm-hmm. I have Crohn's disease. I live with Crohn's disease. I fight Crohn's disease. I don't suffer from it because. While I would never wish it on another single human, it has made my life truly [00:22:00] something exceptional.
Yeah. I've spent some time in that space. So you said something earlier before we started talking about how people define themselves. It was really cool. I want you to share that now if you would. so I was asked at one point by some friends in the Crohn's and Colitis space to define my life in one sentence.
And it was a really easy space for me that normally that is not something that would come easily to me. And my one sentence is crazy beautiful, that there is a whole bunch of hectic and tornado and unexpected and all of these crazy things that happen, but at the end of the day, they're all beautiful.
They're all part of my story. And I get to write my story and I really do think it it's crazy beautiful. I will carry that. Into the next however many years of my career. That's great. And I think it kind of, it certainly describes the health center I work in and I think my team could use that language.
I'm gonna turn it over to you. what else do you wanna share? I think [00:23:00] what I would love your listeners, your viewers to. Keep in mind, they think it's something you've done. Such a lovely job of sharing in so many spaces is your patients are people. And I think understanding the life your patients want and approaching their care in that way is one of the most impactful things that you can do.
I was fortunate when I moved back to Chicago many years ago. To be connected with a new gi. So I didn't have to keep going back to Kansas City. And my first appointment with him, we chatted and I thought I was done and he just stopped and said, what else? And it's something I've done as a lawyer my entire career.
There's a question I end every deposition with, and it is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think is important for me to know? I have never had a treatment provider. Ask me that question in any capacity and he was doing it. 'cause [00:24:00] there's always something your patient's not telling you and it's either 'cause they're not thinking of it or it's for the other doctor or the other specialist.
But he kept asking and when we finished he said, I can't promise, but I think we can do better. And just having someone commit to try. Meant everything to me. It meant that like I was going to get a chance at the life that I wanted and I feel like I deserve, and I wasn't going to sit on a couch or live in a bubble, or be defined by my patient portal and the multitude of appointments that show up for me that I was gonna get to be the me that I wanted and that was important to him.
Just as it was important to me, I think there's nothing more impactful that you can do for your patients. And I think there's two things in there. One, obviously is the promising to try, but not [00:25:00] promising the outcome. because one of the things that I use to fall into the trap of all the time, this goes to the thing I was saying before about ego falling into the trap of promising things that were out of my control.
That a medicine would work in a particular way, or that another provider would do a thing that I wanted them to do before I had asked them to do it. And then I would end up asking, I was like, I can't do that. Or I promise, and the person goes to see them and they turn out to be a jerk. And that's on me.
So I promise to try, but I can't promise what will happen. So that you're totally clear-eyed. But also you have this new teammate, which is amazing . I think I prefer that someone be honest with me, like, as a lawyer, no one can ever promise you they're gonna win a jury trial.
And if they do, walk away very, very quickly. I don't ever expect that any of my physicians can solve the thing or make the thing disappear. I do expect that they don't give up, and part of that is my needing to engage. So I have to be a [00:26:00] compliant patient. But I also have to tell them when something's wrong.
If I'm not getting the clinical efficacy that we hope for, or if I'm having a new symptom or if something is going on, I have to tell them and that's on me. And if I don't do that, I can't expect them to just take a guess. I can't expect them to just intuit that something with a condition that you can't see is happening.
And so that's on me. For me, that's good partnership. Yeah. If I don't tell you what's wrong and you don't do anything about it, that's on me. So you told me a minute ago what you wanted my colleagues to take out of this conversation. That's what I want my patients to take out of this conversation is the speaking up.
I mean, you defined it as think about what kind of life my patient wants to have and see what I can do to give it to them and. My answer would be, for my patients to come into my office or to be on the phone [00:27:00] with me and just as I need to remember that they're people first before they became patients.
They need to remember that too, right? To be able to say, Hey, I have this life and I need you to help me do these things. Not to be afraid to be their full self in those encounters, not to feel like they have to hide anything from me.
I work really hard not to be judgmental, and I think that's more the norm than it ever has been for most clinicians now, especially in your space, especially in the behavioral health space, but in all sorts of spaces to take advantage of that openness of that non-judgmental. Stance and be themselves so that we can know who they are, because I can only help you live your life the way you wanna live it, if I know what that is.
I think the other thing for patients along those lines of it's okay if the first provider's not the right provider. the GI I ended up with after I heard [00:28:00] Crohn's for the first time was not the right provider for me at all in any capacity, and I didn't know. It was okay to find another doctor. Right. I didn't know how to do it, but I also didn't know, like, I think, we had all watched Seinfeld and there were notes in the chart.
Mm-hmm. And so if I go to a new provider, do they have the notes in the chart? Mm-hmm. Like, am I going to be that patient who is perceived as forum shopping because I didn't get the answer I wanted in one space. And it wasn't about the answer, it was about the line of questioning. And it was about the willingness to engage with me as a whole person.
And so I think there's appropriate patient advocacy. Mm-hmm. There's appropriate advocacy for myself. There's also allowing my providers to do their job and recognizing that particularly with Crohn's disease and some other conditions, those medications don't work overnight.
Whatever is happening didn't happen overnight and it's not gonna get fixed [00:29:00] overnight. Yeah. And I just had a conversation with somebody recently who sheepishly smiled at me and said, yeah, they put me on this one. 'cause they knew I wasn't taking the other one twice a day. So they were like, well, you might as well just take this one.
You only have to take once a day. She's like, it's working now. I mean, be honest about it. if you're not gonna do it, like my GI jokes with me is like, I know you're a compliant patient and I'm like. I wanna feel better and I don't wanna take up your time and I don't wanna, pester your office staff with another prior auth request if I'm not gonna do the thing. Yeah, that's absolutely true. So I mean, you talked about appropriate advocacy and I would humbly ask as a clinician, right, remembering that you can ask for another provider, and also remembering that a provider can be right for you, even if they're not perfect.
Yeah. I mean I think I was told at some point as a young kid, medicine is art just as much as it's science. Yep. Art is messy and art is uncertain and sometimes you get [00:30:00] something really cool out of it. But it's a process and so I think understanding that upfront is really helpful. Yes. And some of the best art was drawn by five-year-olds, and so it's not gonna be perfect.
I have some of that hanging on the stairwell just outside my office door. So that was why that was on my mind. It's because no one ever told them they were doing it wrong. Like, when you're five you just do it. And I think, there something to be said for that with a doctor of trying it.
And if no one's gonna tell you you're doing it wrong, see what happens. Yep. I have been told I'm doing it wrong a whole bunch of times by mentors that I chose. Sometimes you can choose a different mentor so that I was taking too long, that I was talking too much, that I was explaining too much. Turns out the patients that I take care of really like that.
So I'm really glad we got to have this conversation. This is way overdue. And I hope it's the first of many and not the last. Any final words to sign off with? I [00:31:00] have a final word, which is the other thing I liked about that GI Doc. So we talk about doorknob questions in medicine all the time, which is the question that is asked as you're leaving the room.
Your hand is on the doorknob and it says, oh, next time can we talk about my chest pain? Nope. I'm gonna leave that door closed and we're gonna talk about it right now. And your gi that you talked about is soliciting doorknob questions before he gets up out of his chair. He's saying, I don't want that to be a doorknob question.
You're holding on to something and I don't want you to ask me about it when I've already got one foot out the door in my brain on the next patient. I want you to ask me about it while I'm here with you while we're still in team huddle. And then I can leave after we've talked about it.
I will say I was not expecting to get Lawyered as the lawyer in the room. But he did it and he did it really effectively and that he did it at our first appointment. Really set the tone for every other appointment I had with him. Yes. Well, I'm also gonna take, speaking of [00:32:00] getting lawyered, I'm also gonna take your, term of forum shopping instead of doctor shopping to my next staff meeting.
That's a good one. I think my last words would be first and foremost a thank you for having this forum for patients, for clinicians, for people that engage within the healthcare system in all different ways. As advocates, however, people are playing a role in their healthcare and the care of others.
This is a really important space to help people understand that. No one is a chart. No one is a medical records number. Everyone is a person and everyone deserves to show up as a person and be cared for as a person. And so thank you for that space. My pleasure. That was the goal.
I hope everyone enjoyed our conversation and we will talk to each other, all of the different people who are in this cyberspace very, very soon. Thanks so much, Abby. Thank you.
Purim is a weird holiday, not just because of the strange costumes and [00:33:00] the drinking until we can't tell the hero from the villain. See, the book of Esther that tells the story of Purim is the only book of the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the name of God. According to the rabbis, God is hidden behind the story, fulfilling a promise or maybe a threat God makes in the Torah to hide the divine presence from the people of Israel sometime in the future.
Ancient Persia was apparently time for hide and seek. Esther's very name means the hidden one. So how are the people saved from disaster? They need to do it themselves. Mordecai needs to listen at the palace gate to the intrigues going on inside. Esther needs to put her life on the line to plead with the king not to let Haman kill her people.
And ultimately, all the Jews need to defend themselves against haman's followers that apparently didn't get the memo about him being deposed, disgraced, and executed while less bloody, but still pretty scary. Abby's experiences speak to the importance of a person learning to make their own voice heard. I hear her reminding patients [00:34:00] whether acutely or chronically ill, how much power and control they can have in their own illness journey if they claim it.
I also hear her telling me and my colleagues to get over our savior complexes. We aren't exactly hiding from our patients. Pretty hard to get ahold of most of the time, and we sure aren't in the living room at 11:00 PM when someone realizes they can't get off the couch or at 7:00 AM when a simple breakfast turns into searing abdominal pain.
They live a hundred percent of the time with their illnesses and Abby maps out a way to take charge of that time. Speak boldly to those who need to hear you and expect results offline. She told me she was very stubborn. I'll go with persistent instead. Truthfully, when you can demand care that gets you 16 years in counting of bonus days, I don't care what you call yourself, you're a rockstar.
Neither Abby nor I are telling people they're on their own. This is meant to be a partnership. Like any partnership, the partners aren't always gonna get along, aren't always gonna see eye to eye, [00:35:00] and aren't always gonna be at their best. Best partnerships don't succeed because they're perfect God and the Jews certainly weren't always buddy-buddy in Persia or most any other time in history.
They succeed because they can be bluntly honest with each other and try to be better. The patients I've had the best relationships with are often the people I've needed to apologize to for being a jerk and people who have made me wanna tear my hair out on more than one occasion. Purim is a holiday to celebrate bonus days.
So here's to bonus days. Abby's yours, anyone's who has been to the brink and been able to pull back in time, God bless you, and God bless everyone who helped you get through that time.