Holiday season in well behind us and, while we celebrate and coordinate getting our COVID vaccinations (side note: get yours please), I’d like to revisit a piece from a while back called “Patients and Patience.”
Then I talked about how our professionally shared spirit of camaraderie and patient advocacy go hand-in-hand with the ASCP mission. How, regardless of what role we play in patient care, we continue to give as much as we can to make the lives and hopes of patients everywhere a bit brighter. This year especially, as the pandemic continues to take over all frequencies and channels (including this blog, I’m sorry), I think it’s especially poignant to remember how life can be both grand and fragile. You’ve read my musings on how doctors can be patients too, and how we can all be stretch so thin it can affect our health. When you think the experiences of anyone in healthcare this past year you can’t help but reflect on how burnout and compassion really both know no bounds.
This month, I’m dedicating this piece to one of Loyola’s faculty who sadly and unexpectedly passed away just before the New Year, Dr. Stefan Pambuccian. In a caustic reminder of life’s grand fragility, he was an archetype of what it meant to be an accomplished and respected pathologist, physician, teacher, and friend. While he and other faculty here push all of us resident/trainees or fellows to be better, and research, publish, learn, share, and grow, people like Dr. Pambuccian set the tone with years of experience, an open door, and an uncanny ability to give you a differential diagnosis from only peeking at a slide from across the room at 1x—not a typo.
While the residents were having a great uplifting secret santa exchange a few days after Christmas, we went around praising our anonymous gift recipients and shared some laughs amidst a new warm holiday memory. The same joy that filled our workroom vanished after everyone had heard the awful news, taking time to process and simply be with each other that afternoon and the weeks that followed. That’s exactly the message I think rings true this time around: in order to care for patients, and ourselves, our friends, and our colleagues, we should always have reserves of patience, compassion, and humanity. While there are great wellness programs, and tips and tricks to avoid burnout, that’s for other blogs; sometimes what one really needs is other people. Peers. Friends. Family. I’m relatively new here in this program, but what I could see that day was an immediate working shift from signing out cases to taking the time to make sure everyone was okay—whatever that meant for them. You can promote wellness all day, but you can’t (ethically) pose any actual testing of resilience. The loss of Dr. Pambuccian not only demonstrated the camaraderie and compassion at Loyola Pathology, but made sure we all learned what it means to be a great pathologist.
Like I said, my interactions with him were brief at best but he gave the morning didactic at my very first residency interview here and I learned all about his bottomless sense of humor and wit. Since starting, he was always there running the Thursday unknown sessions, where I felt empowered to participate alongside his openness for learners at all levels. I even remember I was on-call one night with him on service, and after checking in with other residents, I gave him a call to say there was nothing much happening tonight—I barely made it past my hello, before he told me to have good night because he already checked the surgery schedule and was just waiting on me to call. Thanks. I could never do justice in telling stories about him when compared to literally anyone else in my department. There were countless more stories, and tons of experiences my fellow senior residents and faculty all shared about their working with him. I just feel lucky enough to have known him.
I find myself in the same position as the last time I talked on this topic: at a new chapter in life to start becoming the doctor I set off on this journey to become many years ago. With the addition of excellent faculty mentors, friends and colleagues, and an ongoing, renewed sense of purpose, I’ll keep you all posted.
To read more about Dr. Pambuccian’s life, his love of art and cats, his numerous publications which will undoubtedly crash your computer, please click this link to Loyola Pathology’s in memoriam.
Thank you for reading and letting me take this aside to say, as I have before, that we deserve the same compassion and patience as we extend to our patients and that the values that inspire us to do our best to improve healthcare at large are the same values that can help us build strong, caring relationships with our families, friends, and colleagues.
Take care of yourselves and those around you. Thanks for reading! See you next time!
(And look into how and where to get your COVID vaccine!)
–Constantine E. Kanakis MD, MSc, MLS(ASCP)CM is a first-year resident physician in the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Department at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago with interests in hematopathology, transfusion medicine, bioethics, public health, and graphic medicine. He is a certified CAP inspector, holds an ASCP LMU certificate, and xxx. He was named on the 2017 ASCP Forty Under 40 list, The Pathologist magazine’s 2020 Power List and serves on ASCP’s Commission for Continuing Professional Development, Social Media Committee, and Patient Champions Advisory Board. He was featured in several online forums during the peak of the COVID pandemic discussing laboratory-related testing considerations, delivered a TEDx talk called “Unrecognizable Medicine,” and sits on the Auxiliary Board of the American Red Cross in Illinois. Dr. Kanakis is active on social media; follow him at @CEKanakisMD.
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