I share our healthcare journey with nurses, doctors and residents. My greatest goal for these presentations is to inspire medical professionals to respect the critical role they play in enabling parents / caregivers to become the strong partners with whom they’d like to work. There is no question that we want to be viewed and respected as strong advocates and partners.
A key message of my presentation is based on my belief that our hopefulness impacts our ability to step up to our partnering potential! I know that I only take constructive and productive action if I believe that my contribution has a real chance of creating a successful outcome. Why would I exert any energy otherwise?
I shared with two of my daughter’s doctors early in her journey, that I thought they could best support parents by giving us room to be hopeful. One of her doctors shared their hesitancy to contribute to us having “false hope”. I quickly stated that false hope is better than no hope. I even recommended that they share the best-case scenario in the larger conversation discussing potential outcomes.
When I am presenting, I specifically ask healthcare professionals to avoid “squashing our hope”. Understanding the aversion that many professionals have towards supporting “false hope”, I knew I needed to find a way to “get buy-in”. One evening, as I was preparing for a presentation, I remembered that healthcare providers are actually trained to respect the power of “false hope”!! During their training, they learn about the phenomenon of placebos. A little sugar pill can create a positive outcome if the person who is taking it believes that it will help them!
So the name of the first installment of our story is “Hope: The Ultimate Placebo”. The greatest achievements along our journey have been facilitated by constructive actions. Each of these actions was fuelled by hope. I am confident that we wouldn’t have taken these steps if we didn’t
believe they could make a positive difference to the outcome!