The Awareness Calendar

Friday, 7:18am: Taking hundreds of steps from one room to another, to simply get ready and fully equipped to tackle an intense clinical day, I am already apprehending the 40-min commute ahead of me – and heading towards the closure of my “ring” on a certain fitness App.

At around 8am I arrive in the parking garage: the corkscrew, as I like to call it, since I must proceed to drive in an upward spiral fashion from the bottom to the top (4th) level, only to walk into the building to go down again, on a very slow elevator, from third to ground level. As is typical, I notice both my full bladder and empty water bottle, and I am faced with the painful dilemma of determining which ‘'liquid transfer’’ I need to prioritize before my first visit of what will be an emotionally and cognitively dense clinical day. Should I hydrate to ensure I don’t have vocal cord incapacity by lunch, or take a trip to Miction Town to have fully functioning frontal lobes, devoid of perineal distraction?

And of course, I will feel the vague presence of a guilt-o-meter that could fill up from not knowing, at any given moment, which awareness day or month it is. Thyroid Awareness Month? World Sickle Cell Day? Disability History Month? (This could make a great Quiz Bowl question!) But I am very aware of my own basic needs right now. Shouldn’t that be enough?

One thing is certain: I am aware that I will be completely depleted after a day of coming in close emotional and spiritual contact with 7 patients, including 4 new ones. I don’t know if the world realizes how big a deal it is to be a doctor, to enter a person’s energy field and have our own entered. Again and again. Without having time to catch our breath, recover from the mental whiplash after hearing about so much trauma, go to the bathroom, fill our water bottle, complete the Sisyphean EMR between sessions. Time seems to move faster than me, always stuck days or weeks behind on the work calendar...

And there aren’t enough days on the calendar to be fair and inclusive to all diseased organs or social injustices. Plus, why have Earth Day, or Human Rights Day? Every day should be Earth day. We are part of this planet and should be respectful of it, every day. I feel like we should strive to be aware, period. Expanding our awareness will make specific days superfluous, because our mind will become attuned to all causes, issues, problems that need fixing. Fragmenting this awareness into micro-awarenesses throughout the months and year is way too ADHD-ogenic for me. My already scattered mind doesn’t need an even more scattered calendar.

Or maybe we should each create our own awareness calendar. With Saturated Mind Awareness Day. Or Perimenopause Awareness Week. Or, Detox from EMR Awareness Month (aka a vacation – lol!).

Instead of fighting the calendar, though, I did decide to detox, or take a vacation. After Thanksgiving last year, a friend from high school convinced me to sign up for a trail-running trip in the Pyrenees. Even though I have participated in about 4 timed runs in my life and think I have decent endurance for such a challenge, I felt intimidated by the program, Une Fille Qui Court (A Girl Running), led by a kinesiologist from Québec. It required reasonable fitness and the motivation to start a training program about 6 months in advance. This consisted of jogging on irregular terrain with different elevations and at different speeds, regular muscular training, and yoga sessions, among other workouts. We were instructed to run at least every other day.

I jogged on a few occasions in March, then a couple times again in June. Nothing very regular, so I was quite behind on the program. The duration of my runs was supposed to increase every 8 weeks, but I was doing just 20 minutes per day at the most. And I had never really run on a trail before. The first morning I did, I bit the dust, literally. Thankfully, only minor scratches. Then, 4 days later, I fell again. This time, I felt quite shaken. It was on the pavement near my home. My face had touched the ground. I felt “off’’ for several hours after that. Minor concussion? This was 2 months before the trip.

Maybe this was some kind of message that I should give up, that the running program was too risky, that I was getting too old for this. A few people expressed worry about me training so intensely. Others encouraged me to continue. I decided to trust my felt experience. I gradually became more intentional, intuitive, and present to each session. I knew that the two times I fell, I was either momentarily too deep in my mental activity or too tense in my body. Hence, the abrupt shock upon falling.

I decided to explore safer jogging techniques, which led me to a book on chi running. The concept of needing to run from the spine (and the limbs would follow), in a relaxed state, made sense to me. I began approaching my jogs differently. During the 8 weeks leading up to the trip, I was running 4 times per week (despite some 40° C afternoons) and walking the other days to ensure I did my 10-12 thousand steps each day, plus muscular training, swimming, and yoga. I even managed to run more than 10 km the day before the flight. I felt I could have continued, which reassured me.

Once at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, in an idyllic setting, I overcame the self-doubt that many of the other 20 women in my running group shared at some point: “Will I be capable?’’ I dove into a deeper unknown when the friend I had joined the program with injured herself badly a week before departure, and was advised against flying because of a high risk of thrombosis. But I found new friends and recharged my healer’s batteries in a beautiful Pyrenean landscape. Everyone was so positive, cheerful, enthusiastic. No competitiveness, no clutter of the mind through doomscrolling, no constant noise from a world that is falling apart. Just silence, or pure sounds like bells around a sheep’s neck, church bells, birds...

This trip was a journey like no other. It was not only a migration out of my comfort zone in terms of physical fitness (we ran a very doable total of 64 km over 8 days, with a total of 3270 m of elevation), but it was soul-expanding as well. The connection with nature, the deep gratitude, the sense of awe and solidarity with my fellow “coureuses’’ (runners) added an essential spiritual dimension to this vacation.

The mountain is accepting. The mountain doesn’t judge. It is so wonderful to feel so much. To feel good enough. A nice change from the feedback we sometimes receive in the medical industry, where words like productivity trail us. I think we need to promote other metrics so doctors can feel like they matter as human beings, and that they are not being reduced to the role of revenue generators or institutional glamour enhancers.

And I don’t feel like fragmenting the suffering, either. Let’s simply be aware of the human condition and its implicit suffering. Violence, cancer, poverty, grief... all of this is human suffering. Let’s be aware of it. Suffering is suffering, all its names and specific assigned days or months being only the world of form. And as we become aware of this, as fully compassionate and interconnected beings, let’s also be aware of the inner peace we fundamentally have access to. I know it’s there. My recent Nonsense Detox Awareness Week put me face-to-face with it. From now on, I intend to celebrate Peace Awareness Day every single day. Will you join me?