The Spiritual Gift of the Camino

A week ago, a patient of mine almost died of an amniotic fluid embolism, and I am so grateful that she lived.  This is a complication at the end of pregnancy that we cannot predict, and the kind of care that is needed is supportive-- but if the injury is massive enough, it will kill the patient, no matter what we do.  So I was again confronted with the hardest thing in my life as a doctor-- my helplessness to control outcomes.  In our case, we had great teamwork, and it was a gift, to have such excellent colleagues helping me, and helping her.   This was a reflection on the greatest of the many gifts the Camino gave me.

 I feel the helplessness of being a person holding the hand of a person at the edge of death;  the marveling, that we cannot know if we will be enough;  and that we do what we can, and we must do it as well as we can, and only stop to feel the self-doubt later, after we have done all we can.  I was thinking a lot, on my walk, about the Gospel story where they ask Jesus why a man was born blind.  "Was it his sin, or the sin of his parents?" they ask.  He answered them "Neither.  It was so that the glory of God could be revealed through him."

I keep thinking of that story, as the answer to a lot of what happens in medicine.  At the edge where we work, we can only try, wittingly or un-wittingly, to be instruments for the glory of God to be revealed.  Which is another way of saying that miracles do occur.  When someone says that they don't believe in miracles, I think of Einstein, who said "either everything is a miracle, or nothing is."  But we cannot command them.  This is a hard thing for some skeptical people to entertain.  But with or without our awareness, many amazing and wondrous things happen.  What I think happened to me as time went by, in practicing medicine, was that fear of bad outcomes became pretty overwhelming, making me become over-controlling.  I knew I needed to let go and recognize that it is beyond me,— up to God, or what Rachel would call Mystery, or Life itself.  But to let go of the sense of control and over-responsiblility for the outcomes was impossible.

I really felt the difference, after this month of walking the Camino.  I took two rocks with me, one for the broken-hearted people I know, and one for the seriously ill people I know.  And I held them in my hands for many hours of the day, as I walked along– trying to get ready to leave them, loaded with prayers, at the foot of the iron cross, ('cruz de ferro"), which is on a mountain about two-thirds through the pilgrimage.  I also had been carrying a very special rock from a physician friend with a heartache which has been immensely difficult to overcome.  These three rocks were my meditation tools, as I walked along.  I started seeing that most of the things I was praying about were things which only God could fix.  I slowly felt myself letting my hands hold them less tightly, and my prayers around them becoming more "into Thy hands…"   I started retracting myself more into the small Hobbit-like woman walking along this ancient path.  Nobody asked for my advice or help.  I was carrying my pack, and my legs were aching.  And I was truly grateful for good weather, good food, and the simple but great gift of a place to lie down, and a shower.   I think for anyone who has gotten to a place of almost paralysis with the need to control, it is worth considering doing this kind of pilgrimage.  Perhaps even a shorter time would do– but the month was such a great gift, to be able to reach for a different rhythm, and give time for it to take hold.  One of my friends sent me an article about a new book written by a woman physician about the Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, in the 70s and 80s, and how it was such a gift for patients to have adequate time to heal– sometimes months, for slow recovery.   I thought about that gift of slow time to heal.  I feel so blessed, that I got that whole month, to be able to uncurl from the false sense of control.  It gave me a new ballast, and a new center of gravity.  And the vivid remembrance of leaving those stones at the foot of the cross.