Chief addresses physicians, reads from Wishtree
At Good Samaritan’s Annual Medical Staff Meeting & Dinner in October, outgoing chief of staff and soon-to-retire Kate Lazar, MD, Critical Care Medicine, had a moment. Reflecting on her career at Good Samaritan and her choice to devote her professional life to medicine, her mind drew parallels to a book she’s reading to her daughter — Wishtree, by Katherine Applegate. Standing at the podium, she shared part of it.
You had a moment, too, as her words clearly resonated. With tales of welled eyes and extended applause, we’ve received multiple requests to repost Lazar’s words and Wishtree’s chapter 7, the section Lazar read aloud. Take a moment and enjoy.
“Thank you all for coming tonight! And thank you to Georgeann Bell and her staff, who are the indispensable glue that holds the MEC together.
“The future of Good Samaritan looks very different now than the way I anticipated it would look when I started this term in January of 2023. The last several years have brought so much change. COVID changed medicine and hospitals and the way we spent time with each other. Virtual meetings and virtual medicine are commonplace now. The Marshall fire forever changed our community. And, most recently, some of us found out that we might be moving hospitals on a timeline that belongs to someone else and has not yet been revealed to us.
“In addition to performing the essentials of medical staff business it was my goal to work on building community and bringing our staff back together when possible. I planned silly events and invited yoga goats and wild burros to the hospital. Thank you for showing up to these! The MEC let me spend some of your med staff dues to bring you little delicious luxuries or to relieve some of your stress with a massage therapist. The purpose was to tell you more often that you are appreciated, day and night, weekends and holidays. It is the goodness of all of you that makes Good Samaritan. I hope these efforts continue to have benefits as we move through the coming months.
“I am reading a book called Wishtree by Katherine Applegate with my 8-year-old daughter. I want to share part of it with you as it made me think of our hospital community here. In this book, the tree is 216 years old. Her name is Red. Her best friend is a crow named Bongo. Red is a wishing tree, which means every May people bring their wishes, hopes and dreams to the tree. They write them on pieces of paper, ribbons, sometimes even old socks and attach them to her branches.
“She cannot make them come true, of course, but she does her best to hear them and hold them and bear witness to their experiences. Our patients and their families bring us their wishes, hopes and dreams in the form of their loved ones. They bring us their parents, their siblings, and the absolute youngest members of their families on the day of their birth. We cannot always solve all of their problems or save all of their hopes and dreams but we can be with them and support them and, hopefully, give them some comfort.
“Chapter 7 reminded me of being a physician at Good Sam.”
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“So, to those of you who will remain at Good Sam, I am confident that our community here will grow and thrive. You will maintain all the characteristics of Good Sam that make it my favorite hospital of all the places that I have ever worked. You will welcome some new faces. They will bring good stuff with them and they will see why those of us who had to leave were sad to do so.
“And to those of you who find that you must go, I am confident that you will make a new home where you land. And because it has always been the people that make Good Sam a wonderful place, you will be taking those ideas and qualities with you.
“And for ALL of us now, we will continue to tend to our community, to take care of our patients and each other, and to spend our days making people feel safe.
“Happy Twentieth Anniversary to Good Sam! Good night.”
To quote Applegate, “Making others feel safe is a fine way to spend your days.” Thank you for all you do for our patients every day. Happy Thanksgiving.