Anemious was the OED online word of the day for December 9, 2020. I’d never heard of it, but of course it immediately suggested anemic — and led down a trail of discovery.
Turns out that anemious is related not to anemic but to anemone — because it derives from anemos (Greek for “wind” — related to Latin animus!) So anemious is “windswept” — and anemone is literally “daughter of the wind” — but anemic is, of course, literally “bloodless.”
The contrast not only struck me, but bowled me over and swept me off into valleys of self-condemnation and self-pity. How could I not have known the difference? I’ve been so oblivious! All I knew was “anemia”! Oh, medicine is bloodless and breath-less! There is no life or spirit in it! …For that matter, anyone who can be so distracted by words and ideas and stories is obviously not science-y enough to be a true physician! No wonder it exhausts me to be on service! I’m not detached enough; I’m not doing it right; I don’t have what it takes!
After a few despairing lines of attempted poetry:
Would you rather be anemious or anemic?
Windswept or bloodless?
Does your spirit draw life from blowing breath
Or are you striving for clean, if callous, existence?
I left the matter simmering for almost a month.
Then I came upon chapter 6 in Greg McKeown’s Essentialism - in which he proposes that the task of the journalist - “discovering what really matters”, “seeing the bigger picture”, “focus(ing) on the broader patterns or trends” with “a deep understanding of the topic, its context… and its relationship to different fields” — is a task for everyone. As I read, I realized that he could be describing the task of an attending physician just as well as that of a journalist, and that “A” is also for and. It’s possible to attend to physical disorders (pathophysiology) AND to emotional/social/spiritual concerns.
In fact, “A” is for abstraction, a term that could be applied to single-minded focus on, say, pathophysiologic processes. In The Call of Stories, Robert Coles describes his own residency training as “dealing in abstractions” — categorizing patients by their surface complaints and presentations, fitting them into diagnostic frameworks, examining the bits of their pieces that fit a story we are constructing, rather than listening to their entire stories in order to see a larger picture of a complex human being. Or, as Tara Westover says on the last page of Educated: “We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”
Finally, “A” is for both attachment and attunement: critical, interrelated processes of development that require the presence of others and occur, ideally, in parent-child relationships as well as in God’s relationship to us. He attends to us as we pay attention; we tune in Him and to one another as the Body of Christ animated by His Spirit, attached and knit together in His love. Amen- may it be so.
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P.S. “A” is also for attemptubate: a word for which I’ve had a fondness since hearing one of the current pediatric residents claim to be “a good attemptubator”. (It sums up our own residency experiences in the delivery room back in the early ‘90s, when the standard of care was to immediately intubate and suction the trachea of every newborn whose amniotic fluid had any meconium staining. However, as it turned out, very few of those babies had any need for, much less any interest in, being intubated.) And that’s probably already far more than needs to be noted here, except that this particular word isn’t in the OED yet.