Compassion Heal Movement

AngelaMaría:

Hello, this is AngelaMaría, one of the SuperPower Up! hosts and you are listening to the High Frequency Healing Show, which awakens superpowers through higher dimension healing. The only difference between where you are to where you want to be is the actions you take here and now to heal your life. So let’s take a deep breath and be here and now. I invite you to enjoy this time together. So here we go. Let’s welcome Lee Tomlinson to my show. Today, we will be talking about the Compassion Heals Movement. The live mission of Lee Tomlinson also known as Patient Lee is to inspire healthcare professionals, to return compassionate care to its rightful place at the forefront of modern healthcare to benefit patients, their families, and most importantly, their often suffering burned-out selves. Finding this mission wasn’t even remotely easy. Award-winning television producer, movie studio executive, owner, former professional athlete, speaker, and TED talk presenter, Patient Lee is alive today due to the combination of a lifetime of extraordinarily effective medical treatment and deeply kind passionate care.

Unfortunately, during a recent battle with stage three, plus throat cancer patiently became painfully aware of the trauma cost by the treatment lacking in compassion that suicide was the act of compassion delivered by a loving doctor and friend. With this renewed seal for life and a newfound purpose, Patient Lee created the Compassion Heals Movement, designed to reconnect America’s 20 million healthcare professionals with the compassion that got them into healthcare in the first place. Presented with this unique mixture of humor, compassion, urgency, encouragement, and call to action, Patient Lee is making a difference in restoring compassion to healthcare and to the world at large. Oh boy. So please join me in welcoming Lee Tomlinson to my show. Hello, Lee, welcome.

Lee Tomlinson:

It’s actually very simple, it’s interesting because I’ve done hundreds of keynotes to healthcare professionals. And when I ask them how many of them think that providing compassionate care in addition to competent care, when I asked them how important it is, is it closer to a 10 in terms of maximally important versus a five or six, everybody raises their hand. Oh yes, yes, yes. It’s absolutely essential. And then I ask the $64,000 question, who can define it for me? And all of a sudden, all those hands that went up, go back down and people have a hard time. They know it’s a good thing, but it’s hard to define in their minds.

Well, it’s really incredibly simple. Compassion is the willingness to feel the pain of others, which is empathy, accompanied by an equally intense desire to do something, to relieve the pain of another. So empathy is wonderful. If I’m the recipient of empathy, which is you get my pain, at least I know I’m not alone in that process. I know you get it. But while that feels good, what really makes a difference is when you decide to do something to help me relieve the pain and that’s the definition of compassion. Is I feel your pain and I want to do whatever I can do to help relieve it.

AngelaMaría:

Do you know what I really love about what you just said? The call of action. There is nothing in life that can create a change if there is not an action that goes along with that intention, energy, whatever you are talking about. So I love the call of action in the meaning of compassion, because yeah, it’s easy for me to say, oh, poor guy, I can feel their pain or, oh my God, I can feel how this person is. But if it is not an action, then it is just something else. It’s just an emotion that was there and it comes and it goes. So that’s why I think that this movement that we are going to be talking about today, it’s crucial because there is a specific call of action. But before we move there, Lee, please, will you take us back to your early years and name one memorable life lesson that is useful for you today?

Lee Tomlinson:

Well, I don’t know how far back you want me to go, but let me look back eight or 10 years. I was diagnosed on June 23rd, 2012 at 10:28 AM, but who’s counting. I was diagnosed completely as a surprise with stage three, stage four throat cancer. Now I had never smoked. I had never drunk. I’m a professional athlete, marathon runner, blah, blah, blah. I was the healthiest guy you ever knew. I walked in to get an allergy test and walked out with a diagnosis of advanced throat cancer. And during the course of the treatment for that, I thought I was a tough guy. I’ve been hospitalized in six different countries, broken dozens of bones, had my thumb pulled off, toes amputated, you name it. I’ve been in the hospital a lot. So I thought, how tough can this be? They’re going to give me some chemicals, chemo. They’re going to give me some radiation shots to my throat. It’s no big deal, right? Everything’s going to be fine.

Well, nothing could have been further from the truth. That was the most naive guess as to what it would feel like imaginable. And I underwent three months of chemo, followed by 35 straight days of atomic blasts to the base of my tongue, one of the most tender spots on your body. To say the pain was excruciating would be laughable. It was 10 times that, and I was in such horrible pain that I was given unlimited amounts of fentanyl patches or painkillers. Highly addictive I might add. To try and at least dull the pain to get me through my treatment. Well, at the very end of my treatment, after the three months of chemo and 30 plus radiation treatments as well, I ended up in a hospital with an unidentifiable septic infection at the site of my port.

Where they were giving me nutrition to keep me alive because I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t eat physical food. So here I am dying of cancer. Now I’m dying of a septic infection cause I have no immune system, that’s going to kill me before cancer. My life was a mess. Professionally, I hadn’t worked in a year. I was running up a huge debt. I was absolutely the most miserable human being on the face of the planet. And here I am in this hospital and if I could ever use just a tiny bit of human kindness, it was there and I got zero. These were the rudest most insensitive, unkind, uncaring mean stupid. You pick any negative adjective and that’s the way these people were in this hospital, in every single interaction I had. And what it did was when I’m dying and the people in whose hands I put my life don’t care enough about me to give me simple human kindness, I assume that I don’t deserve it. I’ve done something incredibly wrong and they’re punishing me.

So I decided, “Gosh, you know what? Maybe they’re right. These people whose hands I trust with my life, if they don’t think I’m worth it, I’m not. I got to get out of this world and rid the world of the misery I had become.” And I had enough fentanyl patches to put them on, go to sleep, never wake up, and leave my family with what’s called a key man life insurance policy at the movie studio we owned at the time, which would be a tremendous gift because it was a lot of money and they could live like kings and queens. And that’s what I decided to do. The day that I got out of the hospital, a very famous doctor, a friend of mine came to visit me and I was set to ask him how many patches I needed to put on to make sure I didn’t go into a coma and lived forever like that and become a bigger problem and could just put on enough to where it was very clear that I was ending my life and it was an accident.

So I started to tell him all the misery I had experienced at this hospital and stopped to take a breath and he did some amazing, simple things. Number one, he sat down next to me, got down to my level, looked me right square in the eyes, put his hand very gently on my arm, lowered his head, and apologized to me for the lack of kindness and compassion had experienced in this hospital. He didn’t do anything to me, but he apologized for a healthcare system that he said is absolutely losing compassion. And he said, “It’s inexcusable.” And obviously, as you can tell, he said, “It’s clearly gotten you to a very bad place.” And he said, “But may I?” He asked my permission, this is a very famous doctor, he didn’t have to ask my permission to do anything. “May I make the suggestion?” He said, “compassion is disappearing in healthcare.”

He said, “but rather than giving in to it, how about you fight and live? And if you do, if you’re lucky enough to survive, how about you spend the rest of your life trying to remind healthcare professionals of the extraordinary healing power of compassion and the necessity of providing it to every patient in every interaction?” And at that moment, his kindness, his courtesy, his caring, his compassion saved my life, gave me a reason to fight and live. And it’s why I’m here today. That little moment saved my life. How long was that conversation? Five minutes? Maybe, maybe 10. But it literally saved my life and kept me from doing it myself in. That’s a pretty powerful short conversation with somebody which illustrates the immense healing power of compassion, which kept me from taking my life.

AngelaMaría:

Wow. I’m going to invite all our listeners to just take a deep breath and feel this last part of this interview that we just had with Lee. And that’s it. I don’t think we need more comments, but before we continue, because we haven’t finished. Lee, where can people go to find out more about you on this beautiful movement?

Lee Tomlinson:

Well, it’s really very simple. Just go to my website, which is www.leetomlinson.com. And they can find all about my past history, precancer, post-cancer, the Compassion Heals Movement, and how they can get involved with the Compassion Heals Challenge to bring more compassion to a world that at least in my lifetime has never needed it more than right here, right now.

AngelaMaría:

Thank you so much, Lee. And we’ve been talking with Lee Tomlinson about Compassion Heals Movement. When we come back from this short break, we are going to talk more about his healing superpower. Stay tuned. Will be right back.

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