PResident's Column

Read archives from AAN Past President Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, FAAN, who served from May 2021 to April 2023.

November 2021

Coming Together in Gratitude

After I came to the United States from Israel at age nine, Thanksgiving became my favorite holiday, one that many immigrants adopt upon arrival. Later this month, families across the United States will gather for traditional meals and the custom of counting our blessings and sharing what we are thankful for.

It takes a special effort and an intentional choice to find gratitude during this extraordinarily difficult time, arguably the roughest we have encountered to date. Since the pandemic began, 1 in 500 Americans have died, a new milestone reached in mid-September as I write this column. That means that for many families, there will be empty seats around the table, making this holiday season difficult to endure. Children’s wards are filling with COVID-19 admissions and 120,000 children have lost one―or more―primary caregivers, fathers, and mothers who will not be present.

As many of you have shared with me, the delta variant is still crippling your hospitals and straining intensive care units. Coronavirus is a source of trepidation for parents of students who have returned to school, especially those under the age of 12 who cannot be vaccinated yet. While last Thanksgiving we could look toward vaccines and hold hope for a turnaround, this year we have had to come to grips with the reality of mask mandate refusals, vaccine hesitancy and declinations, and health care worker protests outside some of our very own hospitals.

This fourth surge has also brought a critical nursing shortage, a perilous bottleneck placing smaller hospitals on the verge of closure and creating severe understaffing which is driving even more nurses and other medical personnel to leave. For the first time in history, administrators are discussing how to ration care and patients in some parts of the country are being advised to stay home, if they can avoid it, rather than come to backed up emergency rooms.

Yet, one of the most extraordinary human traits is the ability to express gratitude in the face of such vicissitudes. This happened at Ochsner when neurologists and residents volunteered to perform the jobs of nursing aides having witnessed their nurses’ struggles. At the Massachusetts General Hospital, a group of physicians, including several neurologists, assembled a team of Spanish-speaking doctors, deploying them as volunteers to help communicate with patients with limited English proficiency admitted with COVID-19 when the interpreter staff was unable to meet the acute rise in inpatient care. Indeed, over the past 18 months, I have heard countless stories of colleagues, friends, and trainees helping each other by covering shifts and on-call duty, serving on the front lines, filling in for those with childcare emergencies or for women who were pregnant. They also checked in on colleagues who fell sick due to COVID, sent care packages, and delivered food and other necessities. In those acts, they expressed appreciation for each other, and with grace, accepted gratitude.

Recent research has confirmed prior studies suggesting that gratitude inversely predicts negative affect. In the setting of the pandemic, it appears that individuals who are more grateful may possess more flexible thinking and reactions in threatening situations, and that emotional responses may improve, while negative emotions abate. It is possible that just by expressing gratitude you reinforce a healthier outlook and promote your own well-being.

As we embark on our second pandemic Thanksgiving, I want to share my gratitude with all of you. I am thankful to the AAN and all the opportunities it has given me. I am grateful that I was able to travel to Orlando this April, fully vaccinated, to meet with my board of directors, after 15 months of virtual meetings, and introduce them to our new CEO, Mary Post. I am also thankful that we are planning for an in-person Annual Meeting and that I will be able to see many of you at the "Great Neuro Reunion" in Seattle. And more than ever, I appreciate my colleagues and friends who help me see the humor in life, now and then, and keep my spirits up during tough moments.

I am thankful to all of you, neurologists who continue to renew your memberships, now comprising 92 percent of the US market share. More than 700 of you are volunteers who have met by Zoom over the last year and a half to ensure that AAN committees remain productive, and to create new programs and initiatives to keep our organization vibrant. I am also grateful to our wonderful staff who keep all those activities humming. I’ve invited a small sample to share their thoughts of gratitude, in their own words.

Orly Avitzur, MD, MBA, FAAN
President, AAN
@OrlyA on Twitter

Read more messages of thankfulness from AAN members and staff in the November issue of AANnews^® and share what you are grateful for on Twitter and tag @OrlyA and @AANmember.