CRAZY

I was recently asked to address the Doctor of Nurse Anesthesiology graduating class of 2021. The speech was of course tailored to them, but I believe it applies to each of us…as we navigate this world as over-achieving, stretched-to-the-max, but still craving more type of women. Have a read – I hope you walk away with a sense of entitlement in the courage if takes to be…you.

(Welcome and other niceities) I have been reflecting on your journey, the windy and challenging path to become a nurse anesthesiologist. I’m sure loved ones – or perhaps even you – have asked why choose to become a nurse anesthesiologist. It is a profession riddled with stress, high stakes decisions ALL THE TIME, addictions, and constant changes to best-practice. A person chosing this career must be crazy. I thought I would offer an explaination today of “why” – but even now after 15+ years as a CRNA, I am having a difficult time finding the words to describe the crazy choice and how it is that I still love this line of work as much now as I did when I began. Recently, I came across a passage in a book I am reading (Turtles All the Way Down- John Green) and it offerd clarity – adapted slightly, it reads as follows:

“One of the challenges with pain – physical or psychological is that we can really only appreciate it through a metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language. Virginia Woolfe wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet or the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ We are such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor does it connote the courage people in such places exemplify, which is why I ask you to frame your choice with a word other than crazy…can you instead say that you are courageous?”

Each of you exemplify and carry forward the COURAGE it takes to be a nurse anesthesiologist. You weren’t crazy to take on this program and profession, you were courageous and brave. (final congrats and niceities).