We’ll call her Tammy, she’s a woman in her 50s - hair swept across the top of her head from one side to the next. Her eyes are lined by what are obviously fake eye lashes, matted with tears as she lies on the hospital bed while I talk with her. She’s confused, distraught and scared. This is a patient that lives with epilepsy, every so often being torn from the present and placed into the altered reality of a brain hijacked by rogue electrical activity in the few pounds of fat and nervous tissue in her head. Although she’s dealt with this for a while, she’s never experienced what she has gone through over the past 24 hours - it’s just different than anything in the past. While she was going about her business the day before she recalls feeling uneasy, stumbling almost like she was drunk, she said. She collapsed to the ground, too weak to pick herself up, and began vomiting. She felt trapped in her own body and terrified about what was happening.

We talked with Tammy for the next 20 minutes or so, probing into her life and what she was experiencing trying to uncover something that could be causing her suffering. Her anti-epileptic medication dose had changed, but wouldn’t likely be causing this. She hasn’t traveled anywhere lately. No other symptoms she could remember. I felt useless in helping her. In a somewhat last-ditch effort I asked how things were at home, “are you under any stress?" There was a short silence in the room - then as if someone had given her permission to finally let it go, she began sobbing. We talked about her daughter who had died recently, how her relationships with her other children were strained, how she just felt defeated. While this most likely doesn’t explain everything she’s been experiencing, it reminded me about the power of being heard, of the act of deep listening.

After I left the hospital that day I sat in my car for a few minutes and reflected on the experience I had with Tammy. We can get so caught up with always thinking of the next thing in our day, or task to get done, that we can forget to listen to each other. I challenged myself to listen to others more intently that night, without thinking of how to reply before they finished their sentence. I’m not sure of what anyone else is dealing with internally but if my pausing and listening to them with my full attention may give them the space to share something affecting them, I don’t want to miss that opportunity because I was too busy trying to think of what to say next.