Articles

Elise Henricks spoke at Celebrate Jesuit Volunteers on October 8, 2010 at Boston College High School.

Elise Henricks works as a family physician at the Upham's Corner Health Center in Dorchester, MA. She was a Jesuit Volunteer in the Brooklyn/Medgar Evers community in 1990-1991 at St. Christopher-Ottilie, where her job was to find housing for families reuniting from foster care. A graduate of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and the Lawrence Family Practice Residency in Lawrence, MA, she lives in Dorchester with her husband, Tony Dutzik, and her 2 exuberant sons Max, 11, and Miles, 9.

Below are Elise's prepared remarks:

I was a Jesuit Volunteer in 1990-1991 in Brooklyn, where we lived in the Crown Heights neighborhood, amidst an interesting cultural mix of Caribbean immigrants and Hasidic Jews, a fascinating jumble of loud colorful parades and very large bagels. I worked at a foster care agency where my job was to find housing for parents waiting to be reunited with their children who were transitioning out of foster care.

This was at the height of the crack epidemic in New York City and the early days of HIV/AIDS. I was from a middle class family and had grown up relatively sheltered in upstate New York, followed by college at Penn State in what was known as Happy Valley. I knew I wanted to go to medical school, but felt that my life experience was thus far too limited. In order to be able to more deeply understand my patients and people from all walks of life, I needed to get out into the world.

After JVC, I went on to medical school in Rochester, New York, and then completed my family medicine residency at a community health center in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I was drawn to this particular residency because the director, Scott Early, was a former Jesuit Volunteer, and the program had a distinctly service-based curriculum which allowed me to acquire Spanish language skills along the way.

Since then, I've spent the last 12 years as a family physician at the Upham's Corner Health Center in Dorchester, just down the road from here. I see patients from birth to death and everything in between. Most of my patients are low-income people of color, and many are immigrants from Cape Verde, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and Haiti. I have no doubt that my year as a Jesuit Volunteer influenced my path profoundly. Tonight, I would like to share with you a few life lessons that I first learned in JVC, but have since resonated in my career practicing urban primary care in Boston.

First of all, I believe in the power of redemption.

One of the great privileges of my work is being among the first to welcome new babies into the world. Some days when I am examining one of these tiny new humans, it is all I can do not to plant a big smooch on their fuzzy warm cheeks. Of course I hold back, because it is against hospital policy to kiss the patients, but I feel very tender toward them at the start of their lives, so full of potential. They are there for the nurturing, so vulnerable.

Yet we know human beings are flawed. We are destined to make mistakes, all of us. I make mistakes personally and professionally. And while I hate to disappoint my FJV colleague Jeff Ryan-Catalano, who is a malpractice lawyer, no, I am not going list them here tonight.

Many of my clients in Brooklyn abused substances, which then led them to neglect or mistreat their children. They spent money on drugs instead of food. Some stayed with abusive partners or in relationships which otherwise undermined their human dignity. When they were reunited with their children in a new apartment, all their problems were not solved, but they were given a chance for a fresh start.

In my work today, I deal with patients who make poor choices all the time- eating fast food, smoking, abusing all sorts of substances, or spending all day on the couch. This comes to the forefront often when I teach medical students from Boston University. In their defense, they've been well-taught about preventive medicine, but when they fervently barrage my patients with admonitions to change their harmful behaviors, I can predict what comes next. I've seen my patients' eyes glaze over and their backs stiffen in resistance.

Yet, every once in a while, a shift happens. It is often subtle, not seismic. I've witnessed the incredible power of a person to put her mind to a task and change, for herself or for others. I've seen people quit smoking, quit drinking, and lose weight, curing their diabetes or high blood pressure for good. I've seen them decide once and for all that they will not go back to the person who is hurting them.

Many of you here tonight are familiar with the recent violence in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston, and the tragic loss of four lives. One of the ways I cope with stories of horrific crimes such as these, is that I think of the responsible person as an infant, innocent and unscarred by life's bumpy road. Just as the babies I greet in the hospital, that person came into this world graced with the best of intentions, but somewhere along the path, something went wrong. Inside there remains a core of essential goodness. I try to seek that whenever I can.

Secondly, I have learned that I will often feel inadequate and overwhelmed by the magnitude of problems.

One of my clearest memories from JVC comes from my first month of work, when I was struggling unsuccessfully to find an acceptable apartment for a woman plagued with depression, so that she could get her daughter back. Her psychiatrist called me demanding, "Why can't you help her? Her homelessness is worsening her mental health!" I closed the door to my office and sobbed, feeling so helpless and incompetent.

About this time last year, I cared for a young woman in the hospital who had just given birth. She had been told by her disapproving father that she could not return home with the infant. Due to her immigration status we had great difficulty finding her a place to go, and ended up sending her and her 3-day-old baby by cab to a shelter 16 miles away in Waltham, where she knew no one. She spoke limited English and had only the clothes on her back. She moved into a dingy motel room with no kitchen.

The injustice of that situation, and the contrast with the supportive environment that I had welcomed my babies into, haunted me. However, almost one year later, though they are still in the shelter system, my patient seems to be surviving and her beautiful baby is well-cared-for. What can I do under these circumstances? My efforts seem meager in the face of all that confronts her. I refer her to the clinic social worker, vaccinate her baby against illness, and hand them a free book to take home. "Hold her and read to her," I say.

I go back to my office , where I have prominently posted a quote from a 19th Century Boston minister named Edward Everett Hale: "I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do." We make her another appointment and I move on to the next patient.

Thirdly, I have learned that much of what I do requires a leap of faith.

As you can imagine, becoming a physician is all about delayed gratification. After college there are four years of medical school and for me, three years of residency. I remember on some of those grueling endless nights in the hospital, feeling like I would trade all my earthly possessions for the chance to lie down in one of the hospital beds.

In JVC, I worked to reunite families, but for the most part, I never got to see how they did beyond a few months. I never got to know if they met with success in rebuilding their lives for the long term. There was one exception. While I was visiting New York a year after my service had ended, a woman hailed me on the sidewalk. She called out, "Do you remember me? You helped me get an apartment so I could get my kids back!" It turned out she was one of the last clients I had worked with, and was now successfully living with her children, proudly describing how they were enrolled in school and doing well.

It's similar with my patients. I send them for colonoscopies, immunize them, and monitor their cholesterol and diabetes, but I rarely know if I will truly make their lives better or longer. The studies say the treatment will help, but the impact is usually measured in terms of decades. My goal is to keep my diabetic patient around to see her grandchildren grow up, and to help my adolescent patient navigate her teen years without a pregnancy. Occasionally, I may be lucky enough hold their hands at the end of life, protecting their dignity and their humanity.

One of my favorite traditional tales is that of a saint who upon seeing an old man planting trees, asked, "Why do you plant these trees since you will never enjoy the fruit?" Looking up, the old man replied "Every season I enjoy the fruit of trees planted by my ancestors. Surely, it is my duty to plant trees so that those who come after me might enjoy their fruit."

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I believe in the power of human connection.

I have a very fond JVC memory of a day of fasting in which my whole community participated. You might not think that fasting would be warmly remembered, but it was the conclusion which made it so special. At the end of the day, we met at our support person's home and shared a wonderful meal prepared by my community-mat's uncle, Father Michael Kenny. He was the bishop of Juneau, Alaska, a great man of peace, and also happened to be a gourmet chef. I can still recall the pasta carbonara he made, as well as the warmth of being surrounded by friends in community. If you've ever seen the movie "Big Night" with its scenes of an endless dreamlike meal, you know what I mean.

I also have wonderful memories of celebrating mass in our living room, holding a vigil on the eve of Operation Desert Storm, and planning a Women's Spirituality retreat in which we created our own gender-inclusive worship service. What holds all these experiences together is the power of being in relationship with others, at moments of crisis, struggle, and celebration.

In my work, I am continually amazed at the power of simply being present for my patients. When I walk in to the room and the first thing out of the patient's mouth is "Oh, Doctora!," I realize that often the most important intervention I can make in the next 15 minutes is not to order a test or write a prescription, but to listen with empathy. I feel this connection more deeply because I live in the same community where I work. This has its benefits, such as an easy commute and a camaraderie with my patients and coworkers. It also has downsides, when folks ask me to discuss their test results while standing in line at the supermarket.

When one of my patients loses a family member to the streets, as happens much too often in Dorchester, the loss feels even more real because it happened in MY community.

For me, the power of human connection is beautifully captured in a creation story from the ancient Jewish tradition. Known as tikkun olam, usually translated as repairing the world, it states that God created the world by forming vessels to hold the Divine Light. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, they shattered, depositing that light into every living thing. Thus, our world consists of countless shards of the original vessels containing sparks of the Divine Light. The task of humankind is to reunite these pieces of Divine light---to restore the broken world and recreate the wholeness.

After Hurricane Katrina, my husband Tony and I spent a week on the Gulf Coast doing relief work with our church. We were privileged to work with many other people of faith, but one man, a Mennonite, impressed me with these words. He said. "The words of Scripture don't mean much if they don't have some shoe leather behind them.

Every day, the community of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps makes the road to a more just world by walking it. Tonight I offer my deep gratitude to the volunteers who have chosen to take this path, and to those of you in this room, who help to build it, brick by brick.