How To Stop Judging Yourself By Outcomes You Can't Control | Dr. Mark McLaughlin

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0:43How do you navigate that warrior fear of like, well, I'm not at my best still. You know, I'm not still not emotionally fully there maybe, or I'm a little off. It's the end of the week. How do you overcome that thought?

0:55Dr. Mark McLaughlin:Sure. what I've learned is, you know, you can't control your thoughts. Your thoughts are always going to be percolating in your mind, but you can be in charge of them. So I'm in charge of my thoughts and my thoughts generate my feelings and my feelings generate my actions. So I focus on when I hear, and still to this day, sometimes I'll get that nervous edge when I'm operating or before I'm operating, I'll say, wait a minute, hold on. I know you. I've heard that voice before. I've heard that. Okay. If something goes wrong at the moment that it goes wrong, I will take care of it. You are trained.

1:28Dr. Mark McLaughlin:You are enough. That's it. Don't think about the outcome. The outcome doesn't define you. I learned, I learned that lesson, you know, took me 16 years to learn that lesson in neurosurgery that I'm going to show up for work. I'm going to do my job and there's going to be desirable outcomes and there's going to be undesirable outcomes. And that's the way, that's the business I've chosen. And so that you have to accept that. I had this one experience very early on in my career where, um, I got called to the ER literally within a month of my first, uh, uh, job. And I got called to see a patient who had was, was quadriplegic.

2:06Dr. Mark McLaughlin:They had jumped into a pool and they broke their neck. And this happened like recently, they weren't quadriplegic for a long time. No, they, they just became quadriplegic and they were in the hospital. Exactly. They were brought by the emergency squad to the hospital. I met him in the emergency room. He had no movement in his arms and his legs. And we rushed him to the operating room. He had a dislocated spine. And I relocated his spine. And I figured his odds of getting better from being able to move again were still like one in a thousand or more. But miraculously, he started moving his hands and his legs a few days later.

2:39Dr. Mark McLaughlin:And he walked out of the hospital. Shut up. Like two weeks after the surgery. Wow. Wow. And I did that when that happened. There was a picture of me and him walking out of the hospital in the town newspaper. And I put that on my wall and I was so happy. I was like, wow, this is great. I love being a neurosurgeon. But then a month later, I had a young boy come into the ER and he had a brain tumor. And I took him to the operating room and did the same perfect operation that I did on this other guy. And he had a terrible outcome. And he had every complication that he could possibly have. And, uh, I, I kept asking myself weeks, months after, like, I must've done something wrong.

3:22Dr. Mark McLaughlin:You know, I must've taken too long to do this surgery. I must, I should have missed, should have picked up some harbingers of things that were going wrong along the way. I could have done something differently to affect his outcome. And, um, and I carried that with me to the point where I stopped doing pediatric neurosurgery because I I just, it was too emotionally wrought with feelings of inadequacy. And I carried that with me for many years. In fact, I ended up not really following with him because I moved. I quit pediatric neurosurgery and I moved to a new town, partly because I couldn't escape these feelings of sadness.

4:00Dr. Mark McLaughlin:And then fast forward 15 years later, 16 years later, I'm writing a book. and I look at a picture on the wall. I had a picture of this young boy, Anthony, on the wall and I thought, you know, I never found out what happened to him. I thought he had just passed away because it was a bad tumor and he had a bad outcome. And so I looked up, his mom and dad had a pizza parlor and I looked up on Facebook and I saw his mom and dad still had the pizza parlor. And then I scrolled down a little farther and I saw a 20 some odd year old man in a wheelchair with his parents. Wow. I was, oh my God, he's still alive.

4:40Dr. Mark McLaughlin:I couldn't believe it. So I called his parents. I said, I want to come up and see you. Can I come visit Anthony? And they said, sure. So I went back up and I visited them. I had dinner with them. And at the end of, and I saw Anthony and Anthony has serious neurological challenges still. And he ended up leaving the dinner early and I was with his parents. And at the end of the dinner, I said, you know, I had something I wanted to tell you for for a long time and I never have told you in it. I wish I could have brought your boy back, you know, and he and his mom and dad jumped over the table and gave me this big hug.

5:19Dr. Mark McLaughlin:And they said, what are you talking about? You saved our boy like he's still part of our family. He's still my number one guy. And I realized on that moment, like I had the story all wrong. I kept blaming myself for his bad outcome when in fact I did the best I could in a very difficult situation. And I kept his family intact. And I was calling my editor and I said, you're never going to believe this story about Anthony because, you know, he's still alive and he's with his family. And my editor said, yeah, well, I think we should put the Anthony story and your spinal fracture story in the same chapter.

5:58Dr. Mark McLaughlin:And I said, well, that doesn't make any sense. one one's really great outcome one's a terrible outcome why would you do that and he said well mark you've been telling me this whole time like you know you take a person who's paralyzed and you help them walk again and you say you're lucky and then you have a child who has a bad tumor and he has a bad outcome and you say it's your fault that's an impossible standard to live up to yeah and on that day i recognized like i cannot judge myself on my outcomes i got to show up to work do what I was trained to do and the chips fall where they may.

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