Healing is a Team Sport

Healing is a team sport, even when the symptoms live inside one body. It asks for more than endurance from the person in pain. It calls on physicians who listen carefully, guides who help make meaning of suffering, friends who stay when plans change, and family members who learn new ways to show up. It includes pharmacists, infusion nurses, physical therapists, and the quiet encouragement of someone who sends a text on a hard morning. Healing grows in conversation, in shared language, in the willingness to say I need help and the willingness of others to respond. No one chooses illness, yet many people choose to participate in another person’s recovery. When we allow ourselves to be supported, we become part of a circle that carries the weight together, and that shared effort becomes its own form of medicine.

Dr. Jeffrey Bone