Currency of Kindness
Resident of the Year Draws on Peace Corps, Nursing Experience
Twelve years ago, Dr. Sarah Norris was a nurse living under a thatched roof in a remote area of Morocco.
It was midnight when the Peace Corps volunteer heard a knock on her metal door. “The people brought me to a house where there was a woman in labor,” she says.
The pediatric nurse had little experience in the maternity ward and was not prepared for the delivery she would encounter. The baby was emerging from the womb feet first. She packed two books in a straw bag before she left: an obstetrics and gynecology textbook and a popular health care manual, Where There is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook (Macmillan Education Ltd., 1993), by David Werner.
“I remember distinctly opening the book to a page and having a woman with a candle hold it,” she says. “Repeatedly I would read a line and look back at the woman, trying to attempt the procedures they were talking about. The baby was born and he lived, which had a lot more to do with his fate than my intervention. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, you just got so lucky.’”
The experience reminded Dr. Norris of her limits. Although she loved nursing, she felt medical school would be the best preparation for living her life’s dream: to serve people with little or no access to health care.
After leaving Morocco, Dr. Norris returned to nursing in Chicago and took classes part time so she could apply to medical school. She volunteered as a nurse in Peru before enrolling at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara School of Medicine.
“My thought was to go to medical school so I could go back overseas again and be of service,” she explains. “As a single nurse in the middle of a village, I felt I probably didn’t have enough to offer. But the thing I realized after going to medical school is that you’ll never have enough to offer, no matter what kind of school you finish.”
And only her past experience could prepare her for cultural differences such as a barter economy with no hard currency, where she was often paid in sugar or tea. “
In America, we think we need so much,” says Dr. Norris, who is completing a pediatrics residency at MCG and was named the 2007 Resident of the Year. “I carry a cell phone, pager and an ID badge that gives me access to places and lets me eat. Over there, all you have is yourself, what you know, and your only currency is kindness. That is what lets you get to know people, helps you with your job, gets you into places and feeds you when you’re hungry. It’s kindness. It’s such a different currency, and it oftentimes goes further in health care than pure science would.”
Despite the circuitous route, she’s glad she began her career in nursing.
“People ask, ‘Were you always supposed to be a physician?’ and the answer is always no,” she says. “The road was supposed to be interesting and long, and I hope it’s not over. I hope there are a whole lot more twists and turns, because I have seen so much more than I would have seen if I’d gone straight from college to medical school. I wouldn’t have had a fraction of the life experience nor a fraction of the fun. I met some great kids along the way that I would have never met if the path had been perfectly straight.”
She is also grateful for her medical education in Mexico, which supplemented her scientific knowledge with fluency in Spanish. She performed numerous hands-on procedures in school that many medical students can only observe.
“I probably delivered more babies in medical school than some doctors do throughout their entire residency,” she says. “And because your resources are so limited, you become an expert at physical exam and taking a good strong history. You may only get one or two tests to confirm what you thought.”
As an MCG resident, she uses her language skills at the Clinica Latina, held the third Wednesday of every month at the St. Vincent DePaul Clinic in the Salvation Army building in downtown Augusta. The clinic serves primarily Spanish speakers who have few health care resources.
“Of course, not all the patients are Mexican, but that’s my way of giving back to a country that gave so much to me,” she explains. “It’s how I got my medical education and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Dr. Norris has volunteered for numerous other projects in the community, something that impressed Dr. Valera L. Hudson, pediatrics residency program director, and Dr. William P. Kanto Jr., chair of the Department of Pediatrics. They noted that she interacts well with all members of the health care team, especially the residents under her leadership.
“She is very clear with respect to the expectations that she has for them and does an excellent job of mentoring the younger house staff,” they wrote in their nomination letter. “In addition to her mentoring, she is an exceptional role model. We say this because of her attention to her patients and in particular her attention to detail in the management of these patients. When her commitment to excellent clinical care is combined with her impressive leadership skills, she becomes a formidable model for our junior residents.”
Dr. Norris credits the nursing field for her interpersonal skills. “I don’t think you leave one profession ever fully behind you,” she says. “I think you take all the skills that you learn and you bring them wherever you go. There are so many advantages of being a nurse and a doctor. For example, my expectations of nursing are more realistic. I know what you can do and what you can’t get done in a day. I know you can’t be every person and solve every problem.”
But her greatest rewards as a physician mirror those she enjoyed as a nurse.
“I think the greatest gift of health care is being there for families when they experience the greatest joys—having a baby—or sometimes the greatest tragedies—losing a child—and knowing that when science runs out, what you have to offer is your own presence and your own compassion.
“There is a point in health care when what you have to be for that person is a person; you can’t hide behind a title or a white coat. You are there in the moment and we are so lucky to get to be there in that moment for families.”
-- Kim Miller