Humans Leading

Healing is a Process with Dr. Rana Awdish

• Dr. Jillian Bybee • Season 2 • Episode 6

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I am SO excited to bring you this conversation with Dr. Rana Awdish ahead of the publication of her new book, “After Shock,” which comes out on June 16th!

Having been fortunate enough to get to read the book already, I promise that, if you enjoy Humans Leading, you’ll enjoy the book even if you aren’t in healthcare.

The book is so many beautiful things, including an exploration of what it really means to heal. 

In our conversation, we talk about:

  • Who we are when we strip away all of our accomplishments and titles
  • Her first book, In Shock
  • The cost of self-suppression and self-sacrifice
  • How medical training is "kind of" like a cult
  • Learning to listen to your body and your inner knowing

You can get yourself a copy of Rana's latest book here and find her previous book, In Shock, here.

You can get in touch with Rana:


Join me for more over on social media:


If you’re ready to kickstart your journey (or your team's journey) to a less stressed life, I’m ready to help you! You can get in touch about 1:1 coaching or inviting me to facilitate a workshop for your group, get in touch via my website. 

Welcome And Why Healing Matters

SPEAKER_01

Hello, and welcome to Humans Leading, a podcast for overwhelmed people looking to live less stressed, more satisfying lives. I'm Dr. Jillian Bibe, a pediatric critical care medicine physician, mom, certified stress management coach, and wellness trainer who uses my personal experience with burnout recovery to help others do the same. This podcast is for anyone who is feeling frustrated or overwhelmed with their current way of living and looking for practical ways to make an impact in their lives today. If you're looking to feel less stressed, less stuck, and more fulfilled in your life, this is your podcast. I'm glad you're here. You should definitely get yourself a copy. Having been fortunate enough to read the book already, I promise that if you enjoy Humans Leading, you'll enjoy the book. The book has so many beautiful things, including an exploration of what it really means to heal. But it's also a permission slip to listen to any part of you who might be telling you that you can't go on living the way that you have been. And it offers a path to help you find your way to being more connected to your whole self and what you need in order to live differently at this time.

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Dr.

SPEAKER_01

Renna Odish is a physician, a mom, someone who enjoys painting as a hobby, and is a best-selling author of In Shock, My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope. She's also the author of the forthcoming Aftershock, which as I said comes out tomorrow. She's a much sought-after public speaker, and although she may downplay her impact, she's been a powerful force in transforming the culture of healthcare. For me personally, she's been an inspiration, reminding me to rediscover the parts of myself beyond my titles and roles, including the curious, creative, and human parts of me. And her work has deeply impacted my own. It is such a privilege to call her a friend, and I can't wait for you to hear our conversation. Be sure to get yourself a copy of her latest book, Aftershock, and her previous book, In Shock, if you haven't read it yet. Here's our conversation.

Meeting Dr Renna Odish

SPEAKER_01

I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome. I'm so excited to be with you, my friend.

SPEAKER_00

All right. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Yeah. Um, my name's Renna Oddish. I am a mom. I enjoy painting as a hobby. I feel yoga is really important to my well-being. I'm also a pulmonary and critical care physician in Detroit, and I'm also a writer.

SPEAKER_01

I love that introduction. I love how in there you put um things that actually are you and are sustaining for you, and then your roles and titles. So that was pretty amazing. But I'm learning. I was gonna say, I imagine not always uh the way that you had done that previously.

SPEAKER_00

It's so much more of what I'm realizing is that what I value and what maybe external validation um views as important are different. Oh so when we're introduced ever, there's a lot of the focus on accomplishments or degrees or positions or titles, which are they can be true and they can even be meaningful. But I think if what I've learned from my own experience is when all of that is stripped away, there's a person there with passions and interests and loves that's more defining of who they are than any of that could ever be. And so I try to think about what's at that core and then expand out to the things that if they fell away, I would still be me.

SPEAKER_01

I think that's such a great perspective. And I'm sure we'll get into more of those things you love as this conversation unfolds. Oh, you know, you have a new book coming out. Congratulations. And that, yeah, there it is, aftershock. Um, and that sort of picks up, you know, right after your last book, In Shock left off. And for maybe the one or two listeners, because I'm sure everybody else has read this last book. Um, and if they haven't, they definitely should. Can you tell people a little bit about what that book was about and sort of how it led you into this new one?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah,

A Doctor Becomes The Patient

SPEAKER_00

of course. I trained as a pulmonary and critical care physician and had the experience at the end of my training of getting critically ill myself. I had a tumor that I didn't know I had, a benign tumor rupture in my abdomen while I was seven months pregnant. We lost the pregnancy. The bleeding from that tumor put me into hemorrhagic shock, and all my organs kind of failed. And I ended up on life support in my own ICU that I had just been rounding on. And the following months and years, you know, there were many, many procedures and surgeries that followed that first night. Um, gave me a different education. I thought I knew what my patients needed from me to heal. I thought I had all the tools I needed to be a good clinician. And then seeing us from the other side of the bed was really informing. There was a lot of probably the first thing I became aware of was just how our language was really unintentionally adding suffering. We didn't know how to sit with the suffering. We didn't know how to attend to grief very well. Um, and then we would just say things like I overheard my team say, she's trying to die on us. I knew as a physician the reasons we said things like that. I had the benefit of that dual lens, but I just never knew how it might feel as a patient. And that to me is shameful that like I had to have this experience to really understand the impact of our language and behavior and, you know, blindness to anything but the clinical lens to understand what should be different. Because I had that dual lens though, and I had privilege as a physician. I thought that if I wrote about what happened to me, I might be able to get other physicians to think differently about our culture and how we talk and the things we say and what's hard for us and where we maybe needed more skills than we'd gotten. Um, so that was really what I thought was the motivation for InShock when I wrote it. Uh in retrospect, I think I was really trying to make sense of an incomprehensible situation for me. You know, I went into the hospital, able-bodied, ready to be a parent, ready to be a physician finally after 14 years of postgraduate education, and left it in a disabled body, really just fundamentally chronically ill from that point forward. And medicine hadn't taught me how to respect the body I found myself in, how to honor it differently. My only paradigm for how to deal with sick bodies was either fix it or suppress it. So I think the reason that I felt I needed to write my new book was really that there was a lot of healing I had yet to do. I had so esteemed medicine that I really ceded my healing to it and just thought, however far medicine gets me, that's how healed I'll be. Cool. And then I was left with PTSD and post-intensive care unit syndrome, that kind of, you know, nightmares and anxiety and every pain I felt, I thought was a new crisis. I didn't have the tools for that. So I had to find the tools to attend to those things. And once I did and was able to release a lot of that trauma, that felt like something that I wanted to write about. I find it really ironic that after like all of my learning that I thought I had done, I still neglected the parts of my own healing that medicine tends to neglect. Like exactly the emotional, the spiritual, all of it. Um, the grief. It's I try not to talk about medicine as a cult, but like literally, it's a cult. I needed to be deprogrammed.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I can relate to that. Um you know, that was as I was obviously one of those people who got a lot of benefit from your first book, and I have taught it to the fellows in the pediatric ICU. Our organization had you come and speak here. You obviously, you know, even though your feeling was that that book was not perfect for what you needed it to be, it obviously did a lot of good for people. But um, at one point, which is sort of how your new book starts, uh, you found very um not aggressively, but you found out pretty dramatically uh that that book and that talking was not doing a service for you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

When Storytelling Stops Helping

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you know, at first telling my story was a kind of reclaiming my agency. I grew up, you know, with this mindset of you take whatever happens and you make something good of it, like whatever bad's going on, like something good will come of it. You just have to endure. And I had done that. Um and for a while it felt useful. It felt like meaning making to share it. But there was a point where it turned and it started to be just this story and making the shape of a box because it felt like I'd created a box for the story to contain it and it became performative, it wasn't representative anymore of my actual lived experience, it was just a story, and I was delivering a keynote on stage, you know, I did a lot of speaking, and it was just like any other talk, except about halfway through, I found myself like almost reconnected to my body, which I had been completely um just removed from, and I was anxious and I was sweating, and it was like my body had reinserted itself into the presentation because it knew that all of my healing had been so cognitive and so much, you know, narrative restoration, and there's a real role for that, but I didn't bring my body along with me in my healing, and that talk was really a wake-up call. I was presenting a slide that had a picture of Christina's world, which is this incredibly beautiful painting by Andrew Wyeth of a woman literally crawling her way across a field. She's disabled. And there were all these things about how he painted it. Like he called it Christina's world, but we weren't really looking through her eyes. She was disabled and older, but he substituted his wife's able, younger, slimmer body for hers. And I started to get this real sense of anger at how he treated her, how he wanted to erase her body. And the anger was like disproportionate to, you know, just looking at a painting. And I realized I was really angry with myself. I had done the same thing. I wanted to extract and take credit for the beauty and not admit to any of the actual pain and suffering, which is exactly what he had done in that painting. And that was really a turning point for me.

SPEAKER_01

When I read that in the new book, but then also, you know, think about my own sharing process. I think, like you write, that can really be helpful until it's not. And then, you know, we need to grow in these other ways beyond that. And I really love the poet Maggie Smith talks a lot about uh being a plant on a plant stand. And I have spent a lot of my life um living in this part of me and pointing to my head and forgetting that I have the rest of it. Um, so obviously you have this big moment, you're like, oh no, need something else. So, what does that actually look like? I know that's what the book is, but just what's the shortened version of what that process looked like for you?

SPEAKER_00

It was really a kind of exploration. I had no idea what it would take to become re-embodied or have an affiliation with a body that I'd neglected for so long. So I kind of was willing to try anything. I tried mindfulness, I tried meditation. That was really hard during my acute anxiety because it's just overwhelming to be with your thoughts. I had always practiced yoga, but I got more into a form of yoga called yin yoga, and I found a trauma-informed therapist online who used really inviting language. She kind of taught me how to stay in sustained, non-judgmental attention to my body, to just notice sensations, not label them, not make a story about them, but just notice them and let them be. And I'd never done that. Like every pain I had, I interpreted in the context of my illness or what might happen. Any hunger or fatigue I had, I interpreted through medicine's lens of like suppress it, suppress it, keep going. I really hadn't ever learned to honor my body's signals. And so yoga was really important for that. I went deeper into my creation of art because there's something that comes through nonverbal expression that I think is very honest for me. I can represent things on canvas that are feelings I might not have words for, and it's a helpful form of processing. I even tried embodiment through puppetry. I really was willing to try anything.

SPEAKER_01

What do you think got you to that point of being willing to try? Because I think a lot of us stop ourselves from the getting there.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, desperation, right? Like what causes change? You only change when you have no other choice but to change. It's so hard to make changes when we're not confronted with no other option. Also, I think a sense that the way that I'd been going was not sustainable. There wasn't going to be a way that that ended well. And that was enough for me to really, you know, just be like, well, how bad can it be? Like, let's see where we can get.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think you're so right that a lot of us are drug either unwillingly or just catapulted into change. That's certainly how my burnout and depression were. Um, and you know, thinking about just listening and everything, I think your body at one point gave you a pretty dramatic message, didn't it?

The Body Warning That Saved Her

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I was like five years into my reembodiment quest. Like I'd gotten pretty good at sitting with the sensations and paying attention. But it was also during COVID. And I had also been self-suppressing again, you know, just to get through the patient care stuff at the hospital and the care for our colleagues, which was a whole other thing. Um, and I got this message, you know, it it was like a feeling that I translated into words. It's hard for me to know how to label it, but it just was this awareness that said, I'll be dead in five years. And I didn't know where it came from, but it just felt undeniable. Like it was just this truth. And previous me would have suppressed it or ignored it, or you know, devalued it as like, how can you know that there are no objective findings that just say that you're gonna be dead, you're so dumb. The way doctors do, right? Like doctors do that. And instead, I just sat with it. I was like, let's see what this has to say to me. Because it didn't feel threatening. I know it sounds like a really dark message. Of course it's frightening. But it felt like this like little friendly signal in your car that's like, there's a problem. If you attend to it now, it might not be as big of a problem. But if you keep not attending to it, you're gonna have real problems, like a warning light. And so I remember I was sitting in this office on my windowsill, and it was starting to snow. And I was just like welcoming that awareness to see what it had to say. And suddenly the snow didn't look like falling snow on the grass. It looked like sheets of dividing cells. And I was like, oh, cancer. I get it. That's why there's such a specific timeline. That's what this is. And it just again, it was undeniable. It was like, it's true. And we went looking for it. Um, as you might imagine, I am a very entertaining patient to care for in a lot of ways at my own hospital. So I actually tried to schedule a surgery before I even had path back on the biopsy. I called the OR, and they were like, you're adorable. Like, we're not able to do that, but you know, we'll expedite the path read. And it was cancer, and it's so interesting because yes, that's bad news objectively. No one wants to have cancer, but I also was able to receive it as like this kind of gratitude for my body that I'd never really thought of as intuitive or wise or knowing or useful even. And I saw it differently. I saw that even my sick body wanted me to be well and wanted to be in conversation with me in a way that could allow for that healing. And incredibly, I'd never thought about sick bodies that way.

SPEAKER_01

I think a lot of us, and I'll speak just for myself, fall into that camp of, you know, seeing medicine as something that either restores health back to what it was before or, you know, allows the end to happen. And there's not a big amount of teaching in the middle there where you're like a lot of people end up um debilitated differently or differently abled than they were previously. And maybe some of them will regain gain ability and maybe they won't. Um and so I think learning to live in a body that doesn't do what it did before is really hard, or even just navigating the fact that there's pain in your body and that that's not always like an emergency sign. And so being able, like you said, to differentiate between those two things is really

Respecting Sick Bodies In Healthcare

SPEAKER_01

important. And then obviously, you know, requires deprogramming from the medicine model and you know, into a way that's more like your friend Tiffany, who you talk about a lot in the book. And I wonder, you know, how was her way of seeing bodies different than you know our shared Previous model.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I was blown away by her her genuine like respect and reverence for her sick body. Tiffany was born with cystic fibrosis. And she had a first young lung transplant when she was really young and it failed. And it was almost certain she would die. They'd never done a second double lung transplant at the center that she was cared for at. And so she had to come into acceptance of that. And the way she described that time was just almost incomprehensible to me. Like she still loved her failing body. She still, you know, respected what it could do. She was still proud of it. She still viewed herself as strong. And then she was offered a second set of lungs. And, you know, that was wonderful. And she was almost annoyed by it too, because it felt like it living was going to interrupt this peace that she'd found and acceptance. But ultimately, she lived quite a long time on that second pair of lungs. And we would sometimes present together, you know, shared talks and we would brainstorm. And I had come out of my experience really believing that like we needed more compassionate communication. That was essential. And she was just like, empathy is added fluff. I don't need my team to act like they're empathetic towards my experience. I just need them to regard me as a partner. I need them to respect my body. And I didn't understand it at the time. I'm like, who's against compassion? Like, weirdo. This is a good thing I'm trying to do. And I think in retrospect, that, you know, imprecise expressions of empathy to her came off as too close to pity. It sounded like pity. And she didn't see a reason that she should be pitied. She thought, and I agree with her now, that if medicine could respect sick bodies, we would just treat them differently. We wouldn't have to learn to talk to them differently.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I can see that now, also. And I think it speaks to the way that both of us in our own ways are working to make the medical environment more able to recognize the humanity of both the people that work inside of it, but also the patients, because obviously a lot of what we do inside healthcare organizations is purported to be for patients. But a lot of the ways that then asks us to sacrifice ourselves really isn't in service of them, especially, you know, with Tiffany's view of I can't see you as a human being if I just need to get through this visit faster because I have 20 more visits for today. So I think, you know, it's still hard for the healthcare environment. And I guess how do you grapple with all this new knowledge and bringing it into your work?

SPEAKER_00

There's a lot in what you said about our own dehumanization, you know, that we have to fight against. It's the perfect strategy, if you think about it, to have disembodied workers who think that it's altruistic to ignore their own needs in service of patients. If you were constructing a system that you could exploit, that would be it, man. And that's what we have. I don't think it's possible to be healing from a place of disembodiment and dehumanization. You're in survival mode, and we all know how we function in survival mode. It's like just get to the next thing, just small next step. Like, what can I do to get through this visit? What is the absolute bare minimum? And we don't heal from that place. Everything around us in medicine is like screaming for our attention, right? The like pop-ups, the emails, the all of the requirements, the metrics, the best practices. The only thing that doesn't scream for space, honestly, is that relationship between us and our patients. And I think we've got to protect it. And we have to recognize that what's urgent is probably not what's important. They are different things and really make a choice.

SPEAKER_01

I think uh I have a reputation now for getting called when um there's a parent who's upset. And so often it's like you show up and you just sit in our present. And like you're saying, there's no way to possibly do that if you haven't done some version of meet my own needs and center myself and remember that I have a body with an energy that's bringing it into this interaction. And so many people I watch bring in the adversarial, like I have the answer, and you don't have any answers energy, and that goes poorly. And so, oh go ahead.

SPEAKER_00

No, I was just gonna say you're describing capacity, like how do we develop the capacity to be in that space? And it's different for everyone, right? What gives me capacity is different. If I ran three miles like some people do, I would not show up with capacity, I would be destroyed for days and not be able to do anything else. But we all know how we can refill our reserves. So, what does that look like for you?

Rest, Boundaries, And Early Stress Signs

SPEAKER_00

It can show up differently depending on the day. I think for a long time I was very protective of my time just because I was so chronically sick that I really worried about depleting my energy. So I was really good at physical rest, not really understanding that you also need creative rest and you also need social rest. Like there are things that rejuvenate you that may take some energy, but give it back to you more. And so I'm learning more and more how to move into spaces that were scarier for me before and not have it be so energetically expensive.

SPEAKER_01

I think that makes sense. Learning about those types of rest, I think was transformative for me and for a lot of people, because a lot of times your brain is whirring around. And, you know, like you said earlier with your anxiety, when you put yourself in a stillness place and you say, Okay, thoughts stop, um, they don't, it turns out they just get a lot louder because often what you do need is something else. And so I think a lot of people give up when they have reached that point because they're like, oh, that's not for me. And so a lot of it is just what is the experiment here? And you know, is this working for me now or not? Like you're saying, it depends on what the conditions are.

SPEAKER_00

And you can't know if you're not at least attuned to even your response to restorative activities. Like, I might think that I want to come home and just sit and binge some show on Netflix and have a glass of wine. But if I don't notice that at the end of that, I don't feel rested and I don't feel energized and I don't feel better, then I'm just going to repeat that and wonder why it's not working, right? But if instead I'm like, okay, I did that, what would it look like if when I came home I went for a walk? What would it look like if I called a friend? And you actually notice how you feel so that you don't establish a pattern of behavior that's not really serving you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think that just letting things go and just, you know, moving on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, just like you said, that is built up in our busy days. And a lot of the listeners here are healthcare workers, but not all of them, but everybody who listens is just feeling the pressure to go forward. And so it takes sort of actively resisting that. And I think um what I try to do, and I think what I heard you talk about on a different podcast, is the little interruption during your day that helps you get to that point at the end of the day differently. So, how do you notice your stress or notice that dysregulation, you know, as you go from thing to thing?

SPEAKER_00

One of the things I try to do is to be aware of like the first signs of overwhelm, not the like fully formed manifestation of overwhelmed, which I think everyone recognizes because it's undeniable. And for me, the first sign that I'm starting to feel overwhelmed is when someone's talking to me and I'm really annoyed with how long the story is taking. Like, whether that's a patient or a nurse or a colleague, like I'm just like, and that's my body saying, I don't feel I have time for this, but I don't know how to get out of it. And I feel trapped or I feel anxious. Now that I can notice that first sign, before it becomes like physiologic, before it becomes manifest in like dysfunction of my body, um, I can make a different choice. It can be like, okay, I really want to get my notes done, but people keep talking to me because I'm sitting here. I'm gonna go to the library and I'm gonna hide in a cubby and I'm gonna get my notes done. Like, exert agency where you have it. We don't always have a ton, but there's often a small thing we can do if we can name what the issue is in that moment.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think that's so huge because you know, obviously we all see publicly the um cost of not doing that. We see the outbursts and the bad behaviors and the hastily worded emails, and yeah, you're like, we could just take a breath and yeah, move yourself somewhere else. You know, a lot of times um you're in the middle of the unit. And so that's a conversation I have with my colleagues a lot, is they get very frustrated with all the interruptions. And I said, Well, you're out here, where you know, luckily people feel like you're an approachable person. They can bring their concerns to you, but it also means um right now you don't have any boundaries between what you'd like to be doing and that thing. So it's noticing and then also doing those other practices as well.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

Healing As Practice And Letting Go

SPEAKER_01

As we sort of go back to the book a little bit, um, you mentioned at the beginning of writing the book um in your little note to readers that this is a book about how you move from surviving healing or surviving to healing, and then from narrating trauma to processing it. I was curious now, you know, you you sort of described your prior understanding of what healing means, you know, restoring, but what do you see that as now?

SPEAKER_00

I understand healing now as a practice, not as a destination, not as something you arrive at, but a practice that looks different for everyone. It's something that I think at its core has the character of attention, that we're willing to be with what's hard and bring whatever tools we have to bear on it, that we're willing to revisit whatever it is in small doses over time. It's just a process of returning to the place that we need to devote our attention to and softening to it, you know, instead of resisting it or hardening, just softening to it.

SPEAKER_01

I think that's so beautiful. You know, healing as a process and a practice, I think um, can be both very freeing and then also potentially terrifying to those people who like a really concrete and exact formula for how one might check all the boxes of healing and reach that state again. But I think what you talk about in your work and what I talk about in mine is there are very few of those absolutes. Um, one question I did have is you know, just obviously you write about your experience of being a mom and having Walt as you go along, but how was that experience with trying to be more open and honest about your experience, but then also understandably trying to hide a lot of it from this person who was growing up around you?

SPEAKER_00

So, you know, I think I started out as a person who felt like it was my responsibility to control other people's responses to things and to make other people comfortable. And, you know, there's probably a lot of reasons for that. I think a lot of us have those tendencies. It it's hard to unwind that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And part of my own healing has been realizing that people like come to anything with their own tools, adults, especially, right? I don't have to manage the emotions of everyone around me. It's my obligation to communicate clearly, to be a safe space, to offer comfort, but it's not my responsibility to fix people or manage them. And it's a little different with children, obviously, they don't have the tools. And so we do have to supply them with those tools. We do have to be present differently. But I've been really surprised um how much more I worry about it, like how the way I built it up in my head was way more worrisome than what it ever was in reality. I dreaded telling him about my cancer. I was anxious about it. And then it was kind of just this thing where it's like, okay, that's really sad. Okay, I also hear that this is treatable. Like, can I go play? Like, it wasn't our anticipation, our anticipation of things sometimes is so disconnected from the reality of it that we cause a lot of anticipatory grief and suffering for ourselves. And so just being willing to like show up and see how it goes and bring whatever skills I have and kind of hope for the best has released me from that need to really manage other people's feelings.

SPEAKER_01

That's definitely a practice for me. Obviously, my son's younger than yours, but you know, you it's so tempting to want to control all the conditions and to put every lesson in there. And, you know, when my dad died, he was it was a year and a half ago, so he was only three. So I'm like, what does a three-year-old's brain understand about this process of coming into the ICU? And even today, I'm like, how does he understand it now? And how can I help him, you know, continue to live on with this person who will always be gone? And um, I do have a tendency for myself to just do the overcomplicating that you've described, which is, I think, really common for people who are used to living in their heads and have a lot harder time just allowing and seeing what comes next. I think um I would love certainty all the time, would be great.

SPEAKER_00

And it's so well-intentioned, right? Especially for people who maybe have been afraid of big feelings, to want to prevent them in other people or help them navigate them. And the more we find that we have the capacity for those big feelings, I think the more we can help people be with their own.

SPEAKER_01

I think that's so beautiful. And I'm so glad you've spoken to those other people who have been afraid of feelings because I obviously have always been, you know, in touch and in tune with my feelings. That's never been a problem. I'm so sure. I didn't make half a career out of the fact that I once um had that blow up spectacularly for me. Um, you know, just being respectful of time and I could sit here and talk to you forever. But when you think about the process of writing this book, and now, you know, pretty soon you'll be giving it over to the public to have their own experience with it. And um what do you hope that people get from it?

SPEAKER_00

I have felt for a long time that you know the way we've kind of constructed the system of medicine is not particularly healing. I think there's a lot of room to redistribute power back to patients. I think there's a lot of room to let people reclaim their own healing capacity in partnership with their care teams, but in partnership, not in power over. So my hope is really that, you know, anyone picking it up will find some agency within themselves that maybe they didn't know they had, maybe a willingness to go back to something that they'd left unattended or had been afraid of, or just a willingness to try something different, you know, maybe what you're doing isn't working, and maybe it's just you've always wanted to take a pottery class. Like, do it. Life's short, man.

SPEAKER_01

All right, that's a great note to wind our conversation down on. Um, if people want to find out what you're doing and get in touch with you, uh, where can they do that?

SPEAKER_00

I am on almost all of the socials Blue Sky, Instagram, I have a Facebook page, LinkedIn, my website's just my name, renaudishmd.com. I put my writings there, I put podcasts there. One day I have aspirations to put where I'll be there, but that's probably more likely to be found on my other social pages.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I promise if it's anything like now, there'll be too many places to find you uh to have up and coming on a website because it would always be out of date and adding more. So um well, I look forward to chatting again soon. And I just want to thank you so much, friend, for being on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much. I enjoyed this conversation.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you got something out of it that will stick with you and help you live a less stressed, more satisfying life. Even if it's something small, these little things add up to big things over time. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would rate and review the podcast on Apple or Spotify. I also invite you to subscribe to make sure that you get all the newest episodes as soon as they are released. And for bonus points, if there's something that really landed with you, I would love it if you could share with a friend or with your network. That's how you can help humans lead and grow and reach a bigger audience. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.

Head Shot

Dr. Jillian Bybee

Host