The Empathy Exams Read Online Free PDF

the surgeons were going to tear through part of my arterial wall—these were the words they used, Dave said, tear through —and try burning some patches of tissue on the other side. At this point, Dave told me later, he went to the hospital chapel and prayed I wouldn’t die. He prayed in the nook made by the propped-open door because he didn’t want to be seen.
    It wasn’t likely I would die. Dave didn’t know that then. Prayer isn’t about likelihood anyway, it’s about desire—loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn’t empathy—it was something else. His kneeling wasn’t a way to feel my pain but to request that it end.
    I learned to rate Dave on how well he empathized with me. I was constantly poised above an invisible checklist item 31. I wanted him to hurt whenever I hurt, to feel as much as I felt. But it’s exhausting to keep tabs on how much someone is feeling for you. It can make you forget that they feel too.
    I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling bad because somebody else did. Now I’m not so sure of either. I know that being in the hospital made me selfish. Getting surgeries made me think mainly about whether I’d have to get another one. When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.
    For example: one September, my brother woke up in a hotel room in Sweden and couldn’t move half his face. He was diagnosed with something called Bell’s palsy. No one really understands why it happens or how to make it better. The doctors gave him a steroid called prednisone that made him sick. He threw up most days around twilight. He sent us a photo. It looked lonely and grainy. His face slumped. His pupil glistened in the flash, bright with the gel he had to put on his eye to keep it from drying out. He couldn’t blink.
    I found myself obsessed with his condition. I tried to imagine what it was like to move through the world with an unfamiliar face. I thought about what it would be like to wake up in the morning, in the groggy space where you’ve managed to forget things, to forget your whole life, and then snapping to, realizing: yes, this is how things are. Checking the mirror: still there. I tried to imagine how you’d feel a little crushed, each time, coming out of dreams to another day of being awake with a face not quite your own.
    I spent large portions of each day—pointless, fruitless spans of time—imagining how I would feel if my face was paralyzed too. I stole my brother’s trauma and projected it onto myself like a magic-lantern pattern of light. I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn’t, quite. It was more like in pathy. I wasn’t expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own.
    Dave doesn’t believe in feeling bad just because someone else does. This isn’t his notion of support. He believes in listening, and asking questions, and steering clear of assumptions. He thinks imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it. He believes in humility. He believes in staying strong enough to stick around. He stayed with me in the hospital, five nights in those crisp white beds, and he lay down with my monitor wires, colored strands carrying the electrical signature of my heart to a small box I held in my hands. I remember lying tangled with him, how much it meant—that he was willing to lie down in the mess of wires, to stay there with me.
    In order to help the med students empathize better with us, we have to empathize with them. I try to think about what makes them fall short of what they’re asked—what nervousness or squeamishness or callousness—and how to speak to their sore spots without bruising them: the one so stiff he shook my hand like we’d just made a