Interspersed with the joys and worries of being a gramma, she recounted her own grandparents – challenges and opportunities of caring for them, grief of losing them, gratitude for being loved by them, and the everyday experiences of now living in their home.

What is pain without a diagnosis? This is what occupied this patient before she even received her breast cancer diagnosis about a year ago.

She told me that she picked her battles more and was trying to be less of a people pleaser.

Her values and perspective on life had changed as she considered ways to spend more time with her husband.

This nurse was considering leaving a position where she spent many years due to issues she experienced and witnessed at her hospital.

She believes that most of those who have connected with ACS began with a personal connection, but then, according to her, “you evolve, and you shift.”

With her background in counseling and psychology, she works to bring people together and support patients.

Although at times she becomes discouraged about the inequalities in the world, she is determined to do her part by making sure everyone has access to quality healthcare.

This person radiated gratitude and hope. She shared that she discovered she was expecting a son just before receiving a lung cancer diagnosis at the age of 31.

She had an epiphany as a child — that love could heal the world. Now, as a seasoned physician, there’s still a part of her that believes in the power of love, but not with the same idealism she once held.

He talked about recently speaking with a patient who experiences migraines: she is seeking the truth, he is seeking the truth to find a way to work with her, wanting to give more than a diagnosis and prognosis.

To her, the surgical world has felt like “a wheel that keeps spinning,” a seemingly endless pursuit towards an undefinable goal.

While she kept an open mind throughout medical school, the field of OB/GYN ticked off all the boxes for her.

“I was at a birth recently and thought: This is why they are so afraid of us. They can’t control this” She sat on her couch with a mug of coffee. She is a queer, femme, mother of two who has worked in reproductive health for over two decades.

“I always took strength from the way little kids would handle it.”

“The historic traumas of African-American women — all African-Americans — lead us to not be the first people at the doctors, nor the first to get surgery.”

“Sometimes I feel so helpless,” said this resident, reflecting on all of the challenges faced by the young patients and their families whom she served. Over the last several days, she has become increasingly overwhelmed by events in the news and has questioned her ability to make a difference in the world.

“It’s hard to watch the decline and sometimes hard to visit but it weighs on me not to,” she said. Her father had always been an elaborate storyteller and an alive, vibrant man with a big voice.

The Good Listening Project was honored to once again take part in the annual KNN conference in Minneapolis this year. Jenny closed the session by writing this harvest poem that captured the voices and sentiments shared.

After a history of crippling endometriosis, this woman had an arduous, ongoing struggle with her healthcare community for the right to have a hysterectomy. She was finally granted approval at the age of 29. “It had been like pulling teeth, but finally I felt free,” she told me.

Her childhood was infused with Hawaiian-Polynesian music and dance, taught to her father by his mother. Today, her life’s work is to connect the unbelievable discoveries of molecularly focused pre-clinical research directly to the patient experience of treatment.

She is a single mother born to a single mother and had to grow up fast. She is juggling a sticky work situation, her own anxiety and depression, and being away from home and her kids.

I was invited to create a group poem for forty participants at the Arts in Healing luncheon, hosted by the Inova Health Foundation in partnership with the board.

What does it mean for people living with Sickle Cell Disease to be seen, heard, and understood? For this person, it meant finding – and using – her voice to advocate for herself and for others.

“I’ve experienced a lot of big losses,” she said. “I want to be a beacon of hope and light, keeping the flame lit for cancer prevention.”

Professionally, for this person, Henrietta Lacks’ story represents the need to critically examine our research infrastructure.

“The fact of my life is a miracle,” she told me. Living with multiple chronic illnesses, this patient spoke to me of her journey with alopecia. Of how, in witnessing her body transformed by the condition, she continues to move at once through grief and reclamation.

“I can’t see a future outside of our relationship,” she tells me, “but I also can’t see a future outside of residency.”

When she speaks about her motivation to be healthy, she speaks about her four-year-old granddaughter.

“I was at a crossroads about what to do with the rest of my life.”

He ended up talking about his son, who is now his daughter. Another part of his experience of continual growth and soul-opening.

“When I see an old dude who’s optimistic, living his life, I always stop to talk to him to try to find out what he has done.”

Many of the people he worked with had to develop a new identity in the context of their caregiving responsibilities. “It’s as if they need to become a new variant of themselves.”

“We’re taught to enter a room with a specific goal... with assumptions... with a hypothesis about what may be going on with the patient.”

“I wonder if these medical professionals, in caring for people who face such insurmountable odds, walk around all the time carrying this weight I’m hauling now.”

She took on the Executive Director position at a non-profit in 2019, just before the pandemic.

She reflected on how her resilience was born from moments of shared mirth amid life's trying chapters.

“Maybe if more of us understood history, we could understand each other better.”

This nurse felt like she was asked to be a therapist, social worker, and nurse.

We are expected to research, contribute to scholarship,  earn grants – all on our own time.

Every day, I try to see through the patient lens, and I ask: what can we do to change this broken system?

This past year, he was a right defensive tackle on his school football team, but for the past two and a half years, he’d been caring for his dad, who had cancer.

“I’m trying to focus on doing little things to make people feel better during everything that’s going on in the world,” she told me.

“It’s hard to see others struggle,” she said. “How can I help with their struggle without struggling myself?”

"I'd tell her it's OK to be loud...it's OK to challenge and to bring all of you into these spaces where no one looks like you..."

She was in the depths of transition and change in this “concentrated time.” As we sat for our Listener Poet session, she opened to the grief of the non-traditional losses she has been experiencing.

Retired from the military, she was brought back into nursing during the COVID pandemic.

“I'm continuously questioning: did I do it right?" she said. "I’ve always done a good amount of second-guessing, but I’m re-learning how to show up differently.”

"It changed me; It changed the way I look at life," said this woman about her profound experience during her pregnancy.

“I’m not in a good place with everything happening in the world,” this poemee said.

“It’s been more challenging than normal lately,” she said. “I’m only one person. It's a struggle for me to say no, but I can’t do everything that’s being asked of me right now.”

"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.

"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.

“I like feeling small,” he told me. “Nature has always made me feel small.” He described the sense of wonder that feeling gave him.

He had been trying to cope with the grief, and was on a quest for soul-searching and meaning-making.

Spending time with his grandfather before he died left him pondering big questions like, “what is a sense of self?”

This physician had recently started a new job when the pandemic hit.

“I feel like I have decision fatigue,” she told me. It was normal for her to make many choices at work, but COVID had dramatically increased the number of medical decisions she had to make at home.

“I know ‘vibe’ is kind of a nonspecific term, but I think about people’s vibes all the time,” he said.“ Sometimes you come into a room and it’s just off.

This physician discussed being the only one in his practice network with expertise in patients with a specific type of chronic pain.

“Our constituents are uniquely affected by the pandemic,” they said. This poemee was an educational psychologist who spoke about how much they missed working in person with med students, healthcare staff, and medical educators.

"I grew from the experience – though I think it aged me 10 years!" This is how a resident described a turning point with a specific patient when he recognized how burned out he was.

Although he had been through many stressful experiences in his life and recently, he always held onto his positive outlook. He took particular care to use words intentionally, paying attention to their connotations, so that his positivity extended to those that he interacted with as well.

“There’s a constant feeling inside that I should be doing more,” she said. “But I also want to be kind to myself and recognize all that I’ve given.”

These members of the Wellness team in the Department of Neurology at the University of Colorado each spoke about the importance of community and connection.

She said she wanted a poem about the importance of CPR. As both a nurse and a CPR instructor, she spoke about how the rhythms of certain familiar songs helped her students internalize the rate of compression required.

He brought the tools of mindfulness and self-care to medical students, many of whom had been studying all this past year, 10 hours a day, day after day, in isolation.

The pandemic had forced this woman to slow her life down drastically. Before, she’d travelled around every month for work, never stopping, working hard because she cared about her job. The slower pace created by social distancing had reminded her to cherish everything that life had to offer outside of work.

He had recently lost his father to COVID-19 and was reflecting on forgiveness. For the majority of his life with his father, they did not have a positive relationship. However, in the last three years of life, his father lost his memory and his personality changed into someone who was loving and kind.

“When you get to hear the hidden sides of people’s stories, you never look at people the same,” she said, with a noticeable tenderness in her voice. This woman was a therapist who supported physicians and residents. “Sometimes as I lay in bed at night I inhabit the stories people share with me.”

She began her career as a hospice volunteer and then worked as a critical care provider in the Emergency Department for many years. She told me she always wanted her patients to feel empowered while in her care. “This feeling has to do with quality of life,” she said.

For a long time, he had used songwriting to turn his own emotions into artwork, but in the past eight years he had turned the process into a service for others. He’d learned that listening to people’s stories and reflecting them back in an artistic format was a cathartic experience for them.

This person described himself as a dreamer. As he spoke, he painted a particularly clear and vivid vision of the future he saw possible for the VA. He worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and his passion for the work was evident and inspiring.

“When everything else stops, we keep going,” she began. This woman had always wanted to be a physician, and as a medical school student, was about to become the seventh generation of physicians on her mother’s side of the family.

She was tired after working twelve straight days on her current rotation. It was her third year of medical school, and she was already feeling burnt out. “I have five more years like this,” she said. “My sister tells me, ‘Keep pushing, you can get through it,’ but I don’t know if I can.”

This woman was part of a small but mighty team that ran the Innovation Ecosystem within the VA. She arrived visibly excited to share about their work, and after learning more about it, I understand why.

He had been thinking a lot about race over the past several months. He’s a White man with two children: a 20-year-old biological son who is White, and an 18-year-old adopted daughter who is Black.

She’d been in a physician leadership role with the VA for seven years. Over her tenure, she’d never seen the system rise as one team like this. “There’s so much we don’t know about COVID. But our teams are stepping up in ways I could never have imagined.”

He asked for a poem for his dad — “something beautiful and transitory like blossoms or snowflakes,” he said. He talked about what it’s like to see people change over time, through the seasons.

"I struggled to make friends until my junior year of high school," she said. "Then I finally opened up and became friends with so many people." She was now a freshman at Georgetown University and was learning how to bond with her new peers.

Being a poet himself, he was eager to share his word and recite some of his favorite pieces of poetry. He had so much to share, but honed in, requesting a poem about his wife.

We talked when she had a quick break during her shift at the Infusion Center. She told me how important it was for her to make the most of the moments she had to make connections with people.

She said she wanted a poem about her mother, who died in October at the age of 90. She painted a compelling portrait of a mother who loved glitter, high heels, and jewelry, while living on a dairy farm.

She immediately knew that she didn’t want her poem to be about cancer. She wanted it to be about friendship and asked if she could share a recent story.

She was very proud of her daughter and has hopes for “a bright future that’s as pain free as possible”

“I’ve always loved hearts,” she said. She was a cardiac nurse who had been drawn to a job in the catheterization laboratory. “It’s so rare to have an opportunity to immediately do something good for somebody, but it happens often in the cath lab,” she told me.

She talked about how hopeful med students feel when they first start out, and told me she worried that it would get harder for doctors to hold onto hope and empathy the further along they were in their careers.

“I have a lot of unresolved grief,” she confessed. It was her grief that made her good at empathizing with the hospice community she served. “Would resolving my grief make me less effective with my patients?”

She worked as an interpreter at Schar and wanted her poem to be “thanks for allowing me.” Her background in a very repressive regime gave her a unique perspective about the gift of being able to live here, although she had felt anxiety for the past few years.

"I’m ensconced in the system." He was getting paid quite well to do his job in the healthcare sector, but he had internal conflict about how the system worked. He asked me, "Did you know that about 50% of healthcare dollars are spent on the last six months of life?"

“Relationships — children, grandparents, siblings, spouses, parents are all a reflection of your journey,” she said. “They can be fulfilling or agonizing."

“It feels like time is running out to make big changes,” she shared. The last 6 months were full of transition in all aspects of her life.

Being in healthcare can be extremely rewarding, but it comes with the occupational hazard of loss. This woman loved the work she did with dementia patients and the connections she was able to form with them. However, she also struggled with the frequent loss of people she had bonded with.

The five of them work together in a Pediatric ER unit. “People die here,” one exclaimed, and part of their job is to bring light to a dark place.