Welcome to What Healing Knows

Click to listen Episode 1: Begin Again

Before I Became a Doctor, I Was a Child Who Loved Frogs

Before there was What Healing Knows, there was a child in Addis Ababa, a small laboratory, a broken knee, and one breath.

Growing up in Addis Ababa, my best friend Hiruth and I turned a small room in my family's home into a laboratory. It barely fit two children. We pinned insects to the walls, hung my drawings, and set up a wobbly wooden table with jars, thread, needles, and a single pair of scissors. The scissors were from my older sister Meski, the needle and thread from my mother.

We caught frogs. We were especially pleased when we found dead ones, because we could open them, see what was inside, and try to piece them back together before burying them.

Some days, my father would stand in the doorway just long enough to smile at whatever we'd collected. Other days, he stayed longer, asking real questions. What does that look like inside? What do you think happens when it stops breathing? Then he'd go tell the neighbors I'd become a doctor one day. I didn't understand yet that he was laying down a path, one sentence at a time.

By the time I was old enough to choose, I couldn't imagine becoming anything other than a doctor, and I knew I'd do whatever it took. I carried that certainty with me when I left Ethiopia as a teenager and came to the United States with my clothes and twenty dollars.

My father turned out to be right. I've practiced internal medicine for more than twenty years. For most of that time, I was efficient, trusted, and very good at my job in the way medicine measures good.

And still, I began to notice a distance between the care I was providing and the people receiving it. Patients sat across from me who couldn't name their own medications or tell me what a surgical scar on their own body was for. Others would tell me, “I know something is wrong,” even when their examination and tests were normal. Sometimes, months or even years later, we discovered they had been right. Their bodies had noticed something before medicine could name it.I didn't yet have words for what I was noticing.

Then, I Became the Patient

A knee injury on a ski slope made it personal.

Someone above me lost control and came down into my path. My ski tip twisted in, my knee twisted out, and I heard the bones crack. The ski patrol strapped me into a rescue toboggan and pulled me down the mountain. I sang my heart out the whole way. If nothing else, it helped with the pain.

At my clinic follow up visit, I flinched as a physician's assistant tightened the brace around the broken knee. He told me to stay still as they “fix” my knee so I could walk again. I already knew walking would come back. What I wanted was to run.

The doctor came in to tell me that recovery would be slow, among other things. And he said and anyone who said otherwise was fooling me, then left the room. I didn't want to bring that knee home. It felt like it belonged to the Orthopedics department , not to me, something to be repaired and collected later, the way you'd pick up a car from a garage.

For the first time, from the other side of the exam table, I understood something my own patients may have felt for years: the difference between having a condition treated and feeling seen as the person living inside it.

The Yellow Chair

I spent the following weeks in a yellow chair in my living room, unable to do much of anything. I made lists I had no way to act on, one for my husband, one for each of my children, because sitting still without producing something felt unbearable. I had books piled next to me including my childhood diaries. As I flipped through one of them, I run into my father’s words in Amharic:

ውስጥሽን ያዢው

Wustishin yazhiw

Hold your inner self.

He used to say it when he taught me to ride as a child, when the horse grew unsteady beneath me and I was too afraid to stay in the saddle. He never told me to relax. He told me to hold my inner self, stay in the saddle, and let the horse settle.

Decades later, in that yellow chair, his words reached me differently than they had as a child. So I stayed. I let my thoughts gallop until they wore themselves down, the way the horse eventually would. And in the stillness that followed, I noticed something that had been happening the entire time without my permission or effort: my breath.

It kept going, unapologetically, without waiting for my instruction. I looked at my own knee and thought about what was happening beneath the skin, cells arriving, blood vessels forming, tissue rebuilding itself. In twenty-plus years of medicine, I had never once felt that kind of awe about my own body.

The Pause

That's when I finally understood what had been missing.

I treat. I don't heal.

I can set a bone. I can diagnose disease. I can prescribe treatment and walk beside you through it. But I cannot enter the private space in which you learn to listen to your own body.

In Amharic, breath is Tinfash (ትንፋሽ).

I began to call that pause Tinfash Healing Time: a breath in which we can stop overriding ourselves long enough to listen. What Healing Knows grew out of that pause.

It isn't a replacement for medicine, and if you're currently under a doctor's care, please stay there. It is an invitation to become an active participant in your own healing by learning to listen to the body you live in.

I write from more than twenty years in medicine, from what my own body taught me when I listened, and from a belief that the intelligence already working inside us deserves our attention.

Begin Again

We start where I did.

With start with one breath.

Day 1: Begin Again

Love and more love,

Dr. Kidi

Click to listen Episode 1: Begin Again

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