Pilots and Doctors: Can We Do No Harm?

I was watching the controlled chaos before I attempted to get in.

I’d never been to a medical facility that required valet parking, so I was trying to understand the process but not doing a very good job. I had tunnel vision from frustration because I’d just come out of the doctor’s office.  When I had made the appointment, I was told if I was more than 15 minutes late, they’d charge me, cancel the appointment and I’d have to come back. So, I had made sure that I arrived on time since I had waited a month to see this “Specialist”. The Specialist, who was two hours late for my appointment, walked into the exam room, didn’t open my chart, didn’t discuss the CT scan which is why I was there, and actually snuck out while his assistant was talking to me. The doctor was in the room with me for less than five minutes. I kept thinking someone was going to jump out and laughingly say “Surprise, you’re on Candid Camera!”

A drunk driver forced my aviation world to collide with the medical industry, and if you spend more than five minutes thinking about it, they are astonishingly similar when it comes to the weight of life and death decisions. Pilots and doctors are in the business of death prevention, but pilots have more skin in the game. A pilot’s bad decision can cause their own demise as well as those around them. Commercial airline pilots oversee hundreds of lives in one day, doctors, one patient at a time. Each life is just as valuable, whether they are sitting in 19A or in the exam room wearing nothing but a paper coverup. The weight of decisions can be heavy.

Realizing it was going to be a long wait to get my car, I took a deep breath and opened my field of vision to give my brain something to do. To my left, I could hear two people having a light conversation as a wheelchair pull up next to me. I glanced over and instantly drew a conclusion. I knew intuitively that the young gaunt woman, wrapped in blankets with a scarf on her head, was clinging to life. Their conversation was interrupted by a deep, jovial voice. The valet, who was collecting valet tickets, called the woman by her name. They had obviously seen each other too many times for it to be an indication of things going well. In a booming voice, and ignoring her condition, he asked how the treatments were going. Her response was silence.

More silence. I couldn’t help but look over to see why she didn’t answer him since she had just been chatting with the person pushing the wheelchair.  She was silent because she had her hand over her mouth and the tears were rolling down her face. I had no right to, but tears blurred my vision and I couldn’t move. I saw the juncture of her life in the response. The valet stopped what he was doing, got down on his knees and hugged her. Didn’t say a word. There was nothing to say. The humanity of this stranger, simply taking a moment to acknowledge her, devastated every emotion in my body.

My sunglasses shielded my eyes, but I couldn’t stop the tears burning down my face as she explained to him that they had tried everything, and they were simply sending her home. This would probably be the last time she saw him. As he pulled back to look her in the face, he silently picked up her hand. With her other hand, she wiped her tears. “I kept telling them something wasn’t right. No one would listen. They told me I was lactose intolerant and here I am, a year later, being sent home to die. I just can’t believe it…”

I kept focused straight ahead while the hurricane of life and death swirled next to me. The line moved forward. I handed them my ticket. My car was brought around. I got in. I shut the door. Drove away. Around the next corner, I pulled over. The accidental moment of eavesdropping screamed at my perspective and I needed to catch it before it ran away. I needed to be still for a moment.

The DUI driver who hit me, crossed the centerline, t-boned the left side of my car, and spun me sideways off the road. The driver chose to do harm as she got behind the wheel under the influence. The simultaneous explosion and deployment of the airbag as my head hit the side of the window caused a collision injury induced semicircular canal dehiscence (there are a bunch of other terms associated, but I’ll let that sum it up). That just means that I lost the hearing in my left ear and because of the sudden loss of hearing, my brain is scrambling to fill the void. It does that by sending out a high-pitched ringing, like a high-tension electrical wire strung across the top of my brain. It’s a weird autonomic response to a sensory loss. It has become an entirely new sensory, but the irony is that it blocks all the others. But, I am alive. Still here to raise my girls. Still here. Still. Here.

What the doctor didn’t ask, didn’t know and didn’t care, is that I’m a pilot. The loss of one of your senses is lifechanging enough, but to add the layer of knowing my future life of a pilot is gone adds a deeper level of hell. The doctor’s sage advise was for me to “… learn how to think about something else.” Truly. That’s what he said to do before he left. If I plugged his left ear and turned on a recording of the sound I now “hear” and made him function like that, I guarantee he’d have a different perspective on the situation. But there it is. Perspective. You either have it or you don’t; but sometimes it finds you when you’re not looking for it.

I found it as I was standing in the sunshine, feeling sorry for myself when inches away, a high boil of anguish was caused by a past indifference. At the core is the inability of another to maintain situational awareness in their profession. If her doctor had done something as simple as silently saying, “Do No Harm” as s/he opened the exam room door, maybe s/he would have truly listened to what she was trying to convey all those months ago. That something wasn’t right. That she knew her body and that there is really something wrong. Yes, I know doctors are very busy, but you can’t doctor without situational awareness. It’s something pilots and doctors must have to keep themselves, and others, alive. Only a small percentage will make mistakes, but those are mostly what we hear about. We won’t hear about the woman in the wheelchair.

If we all silently said “Do No Harm” each morning as we got out of bed, maybe we could raise our situational awareness in everything we do. It’s not a separate, additional action or a chore, it’s just a layer of thought that modifies our perspective on the mundane tasks of our lives. With a slightly more elevated attention to our professions, relationships and interactions with the world, maybe we could change the world just by doing no harm.

From the front desk of an FBO to the captain’s seat of a commercial airliner, Erika Armstrong has experienced everything aviation has to offer. If you want to do no harm, she can be reached at [email protected]