Hello Reader,
Surviving Isn't the Whole Story
Rana Awdish was, by every measure, a heroic save.
Critical care physician. Final days of fellowship. Hemorrhagic shock from a ruptured hepatic adenoma. Multi-system organ failure. And then — survival. The numbers came back. The crisis resolved. Medicine did what medicine does when it's working.
And she felt like a stranger in her own body.
That's where this week's conversation begins — not with the illness, but with what came after it. After Shock, Rana's new book (out today on June 16th from St. Martin's Press), is her account of discovering what she couldn't learn in the ICU: that surviving and healing are not the same thing. One happens to you. The other, she says, is something you have to choose.
What Medicine Trained Us Not to Feel
Rana is clear about the mechanism. Critical care trains us to become disembodied. We ignore hunger, sleep, pain signals. We function from the neck up, in service of the patient in front of us. That's the job.
What she didn't realize until she became the patient was how completely she had internalized medicine's value system — one that saw the worth of a body as the labor it could extract from it.
"If my body wasn't complying, then it was a bad body. And acceptance is really hard when you don't realize that's not your own value system, that you're really using this very capitalist sort of mindset on yourself."
She calls it shame, and it showed up everywhere: when colleagues had to cover her shifts, when she couldn't parent the way she thought she should, when her body kept failing by medicine's metric of what a good body does.
What she's describing isn't unusual. It's the water most of us have been swimming in since our first clinical year. The difference is she survived long enough, and suffered specifically enough, to finally name it.
The Slow Work of Coming Back
What I found most striking about this conversation was the honesty about how long re-embodiment actually takes, and how imperfect the path is.
Rana tried trauma-informed yoga. She made art. She explored embodiment through puppetry. She meditated through what turned out to be a small bowel obstruction — her words, not mine, and she's the first to find it darkly funny.
"Ignoring things doesn't work real well. Meditating through an abdominal emergency doesn't work real well. But there are places to apply these techniques where it is really helpful and can reunite you so that you have a heightened interoceptive awareness of what's happening, and you can use that to guide you."
Five years into that process of learning to trust her body again, a message surfaced while she was in the middle of clinic: I'll be dead in five years. She couldn't say where it came from. She sat with it instead of suppressing it. They found a cancer she hadn't known was there.
That relationship with her own body saved her life.
For the Clinician Who Feels Numb Right Now
We spent some time in this episode talking about the people who aren't ready for any of this — the clinicians who are so walled off they don't even want to hear it. And I want to make space for that, too, because I know they're listening.
For anyone who's somewhere in that place, Rana's starting point is this: at the end of your day, on the drive home, see if you can find one moment that felt good in your body. Not impressive. Not CV-worthy. Just a moment — a patient who showed you a photo of their grandchild, a walk with the dog, getting to take off your shoes when you walked in the door. One moment.
That's not a technique. It's a starting point. It's an act of attention. And over time, she says, you start to see patterns. You start to build more of those moments in. You begin to practice inhabiting a body you can trust instead of one you're managing from a distance.
This applies whether you're a new attending or a division chief. The metrics don't protect you from this. If anything, she pointed out, the higher you go, the higher the stakes feel — and the harder it can be to make room for the human pieces.
What I'm Taking Away
- Surviving is not the same as healing, and medicine doesn't always give us the tools to know the difference.
- The belief that bodies earn their worth through labor isn't just a culture problem — it's a personal one that gets very quiet and very embedded.
- Reconnecting with your body is a skill you build slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of grace toward yourself along the way.
- No one heals alone. Rana's closing thought: grow your community by being part of it.
What's Inspiring Us This Week
Rana's new book, After Shock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, is out today on June 16th from St. Martin's Press. If you haven't read her first book, In Shock, it's required reading — it's taught in medical schools for a reason.
You can find Rana and her writing at ranaawdishmd.com.
Order her book here.
If this episode landed with you, forward it to a colleague who's been running on empty. Or just sit with it. That's enough too.
🎧 Listen to the podcast sneak peek episode below and listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Podbean, or Amazon Music.
Stay mindful and keep leading,
Lillian
Founder & CEO
Ready for More? Join our FREE Community:
This is our free community where we host:
our quarterly Book Rounds book club,
monthly live streaming webinars,
and resources related to leadership and wellbeing.
If you're looking for like-minded support and real growth, this is your space.
Prefer personalized support?
Book a Call to explore how we can support your unique journey in healthcare.
To make sure you never miss an update, please:
- Move this email to your Primary inbox (see steps above).
- Add us to your contacts.
- Click and reply to let your inbox know you want our emails. Plus we love to hear from you!
If you want to update your preferences or unsubscribe, just click the link below.
