One of the scariest moments in my life was watching my six-year-old son go through EEG (electroencephalogram). As I sat in the half-dark exam room, watching squiggles on the monitor scribble a message I couldn’t read, I felt powerless. Not being able to crack the code the brain signals were sending; I couldn’t make any sense of what was going on.
Thanks to Dr. Google, I’d already guessed that my son as suffering from absence seizures. The involuntary eye rolling and split-second gaps in his speech had been happening so frequently that I knew something wasn’t right. And the pediatrician who’d ordered the EEG had more or less confirmed my instinctive diagnosis.
But seeing my son’s blond curls plastered down with electrodes, while the monitor went through cycles of fireworks, I didn’t find knowledge of the medical condition reassuring. I felt unmoored, floating into a new reality where I had no idea how to find my footing.
So, you can imagine how anxious I was when my son’s father and I sat down with the pediatric neurologist a week or so later to learn the test results. Despite my obsessive Googling, I really had no idea what would come next. And my worried brain didn’t seem able to hold onto much information about brain disorders.
To my great relief, Dr. Dooley handled the consultation in a way that put me instantly at ease and instilled confidence. I want to walk you through exactly how he did this because his approach provides a communication model that applies across many different contexts.
First, in the gentlest Irish brogue I’ve ever heard, Dr. Dooley assured us that our son would probably grow out of epilepsy (which he eventually did). Phew! I could feel my clenched abdominal muscles start to relax a bit, and I could take a real breath for the first time in days.
Then, Dr. Dooley pulled his laptop to the edge of his desk and walked us through a short slide presentation describing the various pharmaceutical options. He used simple diagrams and accessible language, focusing not on how the drugs worked but on their likely side effects. OK, I thought, we have choices here. Where there’s choice, there’s hope.
Finally, when I asked for Dr. Dooley’s recommendation, this kindest of physicians said something I’ll never forget.
He couldn’t really give an opinion, he said, because “the more we learn about the brain, the more we realize how little we know.”
That was the moment when I felt like a parent again, not someone trapped in a TV medical drama. Paradoxically, the expert’s humble confession about the limit of his expertise felt empowering.
I took another breath and asked Dr. Dooley to flip back through the slides. The first time through the presentation, the content hadn’t really sunk in. Now, even though I knew that none of the drugs came without risk, I felt able to truly consider the different possibilities.
For the first time in this medical journey, I actually felt the sense of possibility. When the medical expert showed up with humility, his compassion touched me. When he was willing to admit his limits, he enabled me to show up as a human too. I could shift out of panic mode and return to being a protective, proactive mom.
Dr. Dooley, I should mention, wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill neurologist. When I knew him, he was head of pediatric neurology at the IWK Hospital in Halifax and taught in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Medicine. He was, in other words, an über expert. But notice that at no point in the interaction I’ve described did he parade his credentials as a way to establish himself as an authority figure.
Instead, he led with compassion, communicated using everyday language, and admitted the boundaries of his knowledge. His Plain Language strategy (the slide presentation) was effective only because it was framed through language and gestures that communicated caring and a shared vulnerability.
I think back to this story often because it reminds me that streamlining language and visuals is just part of what it takes to share complex scientific or technical information with non-experts. Plain Language has its place, but in many situations, I’d say we need less of it and more of Brené Brown’s wisdom.
Brown, as you may know, is a sociologist and leadership consultant who studies the positive social effects of vulnerability. I’ll sign off today with a thought from her book Daring Greatly:
“Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.”
How can you embrace vulnerability in the communication situations you’re facing this week—and, like Dr. Dooley, transform them into meaningful human experiences that empower others and change lives?
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