Pausing to reflect while leaving my EMMC home

Someday soon Eastern Maine Medical Center will pack me up with my stethoscope and send me off to be vice president and chief medical officer of its parent company, Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems. When it does I will feel like a child leaving home, my mind racing because I will be doing exciting new things, and my heart broken because I will also be leaving the hospital I have loved.

Its patients and its staff raised me from a pup, starting the day I first walked through its doors 16 years ago as a doctor in training. They taught me much of what I know today, and made me much of what I am. Here’s a partial list of what I have liked and learned at EMMC:

. I learned how to run a “code,” that time when the patient’s heart stops beating and the young doctor’s starts racing, and when the whole room is full of smart people waiting for you to tell them what to do. You find out then whether you have what it takes to lead;

. I learned when to pull out the stops for the patient’s survival, and when to stop pulling for the patient’s survival;

. I learned how to tell a family that their loved one had died: to feel first the meaning of what I was about to say, to take a deep breath and slow my heart before I walked into the room, to sit down and look them in the eyes when we talked about what had happened, and then how to close the door behind me and move on to the next patient;

. I like that many of its staff remember when I started there, wet behind the ears and greener than Kermit, and that they have watched my career over the years with pride because they helped train me. I carry their pride with me every day, like a note in my pocket from Mom on the first day of school;

. I like the way the morning sun rises over the Penobscot River and shines into the hospital’s windows. On many mornings after the sad events of a night on call had seemed to suck the energy out of my soul I had it refilled by a few moments standing in the sun-filled windows of EMMC’s neonatal intensive-care unit, surrounded by new life and warmed by the light and the hubbub of a new day;

. I learned that great nurses are a great gift, and that it is not simply the doctor’s peril we ignore them at, but our patients’;

. I like that the original Eastern Maine General Hospital is still there at one end of the EMMC campus. It is a resolute stone reminder of the commitment of the hospital’s physician founders to the patients of Bangor and eastern Maine, and to walk by it is to be reminded that a great passion for patients makes for a future that is solid, if not easy;

. I like that its staff hate making mistakes in the care of a patient, and that they go crazy trying to avoid making the same mistake twice. From them I learned to carry old mistakes like old wounds, because the pain reminds me tomorrow is another day with a million chances for another error;

. I learned that great doctors are the coolest people in the room when things are going badly for the patient, because a cool head at the helm means cool heads all around, and brains thinking about the patient instead of fuming about a jerk in a white coat;

. I like that EMMC trains medical professionals: doctors and nurses and emergency medical technicians and surgical techs and respiratory therapists and radiographers and more. They get in the way and slow you down, but they smarten you up by asking great questions, and energize you every day they are underfoot. I was one of them and one day one of them will “be” me. Teaching hospitals are better hospitals, and hospitals and patients who put up with students are better than cream in coffee;

. I like the way that coming to work each day felt like coming to my second home. Staff know me and greet me, one of its housekeepers asks if I brought her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee because she shares my addiction, and others ask about my wife and children because they know us all. Some read my column, and want to talk about it, many still call me “Erik” and not “Dr. Steele,” and they see it as their jobs to help keep me humble;

. I learned from nurses in Labor and Delivery to swaddle a stillborn infant and allow the mother time with it in her arms. They taught me that just because the infant had died did not mean its mother did not want the memory of its weight in her arms and its head against her breast;

. I like the way EMMC’s front doors open automatically, allowing me to blow through them with white coat flapping as though I am on my way to some patient-care emergency even though I am really just late to some darn meeting;

. I like the way its CEO knows the head valet at the front door, that they call each other by first names, and that the CEO is smart enough to happily accept the fact that most patients care more about the valet than the CEO;

. I like that I can recommend EMMC with pride and without reservation, to my patients and my family, to my community and my region. That’s not because it is perfect, but because I know personally that it wants to be.

In my new role I will still work with EMMC, and will take care of my patients there, but I will not walk through its doors each day to help run the hospital I had come to love. Along the way from green intern to hospital vice president I have always kept my stethoscope in my pocket and the lessons I have learned from Eastern Maine Medical Center’s patients and staff close to my heart. And I always will.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.