When I first heard Tim Engberg describe the feeling of intense loneliness and separation from humanity he felt as he was being wheeled on a gurney into surgery, I immediately pictured myself in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling, desperate for the touch of a familiar hand, afraid. When you're well, you forget so quickly how lonely and scary it is to be sick, and in Engberg’s case, with enormous pain in his neck, an infection threatening to render him paralyzed, and the enormity of the looming surgery, the sense of aloneness was overwhelming.
Engberg just so happens to be the vice president of Stanford Health Care’s Ambulatory Care. Most of his days he spends as an executive of a hospital, thinking about how to ensure that patients are being taken care of in the best possible way. Like many of us, it took being a patient himself to fully understand what a difference our nurses and doctors make and how they can pull someone back from the brink of despair to full recovery, or as Engberg puts it, “back into the human race.”
Engerb's story is captured in the video above.
