Life Changing Moments: Tragedy to Miracle, with Dr. Louis Profeta

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Dr. Louis Profeta has had several life-changing moments in his career and training. The most impactful for these personally was when his child was diagnosed with cancer. That diagnosis resulted in an entire community of medical students coming together, and changed Dr. Profeta’s career path, leading him to be called to teach college kids the dangers of high-risk behaviors.

And if you find yourself in a moment that is difficult to find the Miracle, a fresh perspective from a coach may help. Reach out to www.mymdcoaches.com

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Louis M. Profeta is a nationally recognized, award-winning writer and Emergency Physician at St. Vincent Hospital of Indianapolis. He is clinical instructor of Emergency Medicine at Indiana University and Marian University Schools of Medicine. A graduate of Indiana University and its School of Medicine, Dr. Profeta completed his post-graduate training in Emergency Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is a dynamic and sought-after public speaker and writer as well as a frequent guest on TV and radio who has gained critical acclaim for his essays on topics such as his eye-opening look at our national preparedness for influenza pandemics in What Scares Me More than Ebola.

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Transcript

[0:00] I always thought I was tough, you know, being able to being an ER doc and a level one trauma center, but watching my kid battle cancer for seven months, man, oh man, I really learned about heroism.

[0:17] There are times in our lives that change the way we see the world.
Navigating these challenges can take insight, trusted confidants, or even the coach.
Let’s explore those moments. In this companion podcast to Rx for Success, we will discover ways to learn and write our own success stories together.
I’m Dr. Dale Waxman, a physician coach with MD Coaches, and this is Life-Changing Moments.
I am very excited to have Dr. Louis Profeta on as my guest today.
Dr. Perfetta is an emergency physician at St. Vincent Hospital of Indianapolis.
In addition to a long medical career, he is a nationally recognized award-winning writer, public speaker, and frequent guest on television and radio.
He writes and speaks on the inner experience of the physician as well as contemporary ethical challenges in medicine.
Dr. Perfetta’s path into medicine story is chronicled in Rx for Success podcast number 91, which, because it was one of our most downloaded episodes, was rebroadcast as an encore as Rx for Success podcast number 156, which you can find in your favorite way to find podcasts.

[1:39] Well, during that captivating conversation with Dr. Cook, I heard something in Dr. Perfetta’s Prescription for Success that I wanted to hear more about.
We’ll get to that in just a minute, but right now, let me welcome Dr. Profeta.
Lewis, welcome to Life-Changing Moments. Hey, Bill. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, really great to have you. I’ve been an admirer of your writing and your TEDx talk, which I invite people that are listening to take a look at to get a real good feel for what it’s like to be an emergency physician and that life happens.
Life is all happening right there.

[2:15] Yes, thank you. For our listeners who may not have heard that, can you briefly tell us what you’re doing professionally right now?
Well, I’m still stupid enough to be practicing full-time clinical emergency medicine after more than three decades in a level one trauma center. I still love it.
I have a clinical teaching position at Marion University School of Osteopathic Medicine, I travel the country speaking mostly on college campuses about drug and alcohol and sexual assault related issues on college campuses, also at high schools and sort of private parent events all over America.
So if I’m not doing clinical work, I’m teaching or I’m writing or I’m speaking mostly around the country. So I’m still busy.
Where do you, I’m just curious, where do you get your energy to do all that?
That sounds pretty busy. You know, that’s a good question.
That’s a good question. I sort of made a mention about this in an article I wrote recently sort of about trying to reboot my soul is I still think I have something to offer the world and so I still have that inner drive. I still care about my community. I still have the energy level to do it. I still think medicine is a noble profession and it’s a combination of loving it and also feeling a duty to still be a part of it and still offer something to the world.

[3:34] Yeah, sounds like you get energy from the work that you do, connecting with others from the writing and from the clinical work, as well as give energy.
Yeah, absolutely.
Neat. Well, let’s get right to that section of the Rx for Success podcast that I wanted to hone in on today.
So when you were delivering your personal prescription for success, your third item in there was intriguing to me.
And so what I want to do is just play that back. It’s just a 15-second clip.

[4:03] And then we’ll chat about that. A third part, and I think we sort of touched on it a little bit, every tragedy in your life, I don’t care how small or great it is, hides a miracle.
I mean, it really does. And it may take you years to see it.
There’s a chapter in my book about how some girls accidentally dumped a charcoal grill on my head back in the 80s and how 15 years later that led to a young boy getting the first intestinal transplant.
So there’s a couple of stories in there. You know, we might get to that story about the charcoal grill, but I want to just start with just repeating that, that every tragedy in your life hides a miracle.
And so I want to ask you how you came to that, but before we even come to that, how do you define tragedy and how do you define miracle?
Oh boy, that’s a good question. I mean, think about it in your own life. I mean, I’m certain that there were times where you were experiencing something at that moment that seemed like it was the worst possible thing that could happen to you or it was an incredibly horrible experience and then in retrospect, when you look back at it, it either wasn’t as bad as you thought it was or that it wasn’t.

[5:23] That it sparked something in you that changed you at a deeper level and made you a better person.
So, I think tragedy is how you feel at that given moment in miracles, how it transcends the event itself, and how it changes you. I think that’s what it is. It’s really a spectrum.

[5:41] We sometimes have to step out of ourselves and look back at some of these bad points in our lives and realize, boy, man, I’m actually grateful I went through that. Even though as bad as it was at the time, it really has helped me to grow and made me a better person down the line.
So I think that’s sort of the miracles, a transformative effect that tragedy can have on you.
Yeah. So I’m hearing you say that the way that you’re thinking of tragedy is something, difficult circumstances, really challenging, unpleasant situations, and then the miracle part is that there’s something that’s transformative but may not be seen at that time.
It may take decades for you to get to that realization. Sometimes we have to let stuff like that play itself out.
It’s amazing that if we put a little effort into looking at some of those tragic moments in our lives, I think sometimes it actually, in a lot of ways, can make you smile and go, wow, I never thought about that now.
Then when I look back at it, it wasn’t as bad as it was, whether it was a breakup when were in seventh grade, or whatever it was.
Certainly some things can never be rectified, but there are other things, and probably the majority of tragic events in your life actually have transformative capabilities.
Hi, I’m Rhonda Crowe, founder and CEO for MD Coaches.

[7:10] Here on Rx for Success, we interview a lot of great medical professionals on how they grew their careers, how they overcame challenges, and how they handle day-to-day work.

[7:21] I really hope you’re getting a lot of great information, but if you’re looking for an answer to a specific problem, management or administration challenge, or if you’re feeling just a bit burnt out, like maybe you chose the wrong career, well, then there’s a faster way to get the help you need.
No, it’s not counseling. It’s coaching.
Rx for Success is produced by MD Coaches, a team of physicians who have been where you are. I know you’re used to going it alone, but you don’t have to.
Get the support you need today. Visit us at MyMDCoaches.com to schedule your complimentary consultation.
Again that’s MyMDCoaches.com because you’re not in this alone.

[8:08] We’ll get back to our interview in just a moment, but right now I want to tell you a little bit about Physician Outlook.
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It’s available online and in print.
It’s really unique among physician lifestyle magazines. And like the Prescription for Success podcast, Physician Outlook amplifies the voice of any physician who has something to say. It also engages patients who still believe in physician-led team-based care. And Prescription for Success listeners can.

[8:59] Get three months free when you enter our promo code RX4Success and select the monthly option at checkout. That’s a really great deal on this stunning publication.
And now let’s get back to today’s interview. So I know that in Rx for Success, Randy asks you to prepare before the recording, you know, what are my prescriptions for success?
And you put some thought into those and they’re all very thoughtful.
Something must have triggered you to say, my prescription for success is to really look at tragedy in life might be hiding a miracle.
So it makes me wonder, is there a story there about, or stories that led you to wanting to suggest to people to consider this?
Well, I sort of allude to the charcoal grill incident. We can touch base with that, but there was a bigger event in my life. And that was back in 2014.

[10:03] I got a phone call from a doctor in New York City. My son was in college at the time.
My oldest boy was at Yeshiva University at the time. He had fallen ill and I had sent him to the emergency department.
They called me up from the ER and told me my son had acute leukemia.
I’m here in Indianapolis and I’m hopping in a car and I’m driving to New York and I’m screaming and I’m crying and I’m pounding the window of the steering wheel of my car.
My youngest boy is in the car with me trying to keep me from wrecking the car, driving all night to get to my son, not even know if he was going to be alive by the time I got there.

[10:39] You know, I spent seven months at Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital with my oldest boy, you know, wondering if, you know, today’s the day my son’s going to die, and I was sitting in a chair with him.

[10:51] And I always thought I was tough, you know, being able to being an ER doc at a level one trauma center but watching my kid battle cancer for seven months.
Man, oh man, I really learned about heroism. I mean, I really learned about the strength of character.
It was sort of in that moment that I realized, man, I was a flea.
I was a flea compared to my son.

[11:18] And I also sort of realized, sort of, you learn about love at a whole different level.
You think you love somebody, and then one day you have a kid, and you realize, oh man, now I really know what love is like.
And then you realize how much you love your kid, and then faced with the prospect of your kid dying, then you really understand the depth of love.
So the tragedy of my son having cancer, the tragedy of my son sitting there for seven months and watching his strength and watching how he interacted with staff and how he never complained and everything like that, you don’t think that has a transformative, miraculous transformative effect on my life.

[11:56] Absolutely it did. Okay. And so it’s stuff like that. And Max, thank God, is doing great, okay?
He’s in remission, he’s nearly 30 years old, he’s done incredibly well.
And to watch the students like at Yeshiva University, they poured in by the hundreds to Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital. And I think at that time they said it was the most blood ever donated in the history of Sloan Kettering in the name of one person.
Kids pouring in from his university to give blood to Sloan Kettering for my boys.
So, I mean, think about the miraculous outcomes of the tragedy of my son having cancer, helping his father grow to heights that would have never occurred had that not happened, to watch, be able to bear witness to his heroism, to watch the coming together of all his friends and his campus.
And then, you know, just to see that and to understand that at a deeper level, I mean, man, what an experience that was.
So, yeah, and that’s one of the reasons why now I travel America talking on college campuses, because I don’t want another, you know, during that time, I still had to come back to Indianapolis and I still had to work.

[13:06] So periodically, when his blood counts would come up, he’d take a chemo holiday, I’d hop a plane on LaGuardia, fly back to India, and I’d work like a few shifts.
And I remember two shifts in a row, I had taken care of young men that had died of fentanyl overdoses that were the same age as my boy and here’s my son languishing in a hospital in a cancer ward and these two kids are the same age from good middle class families and they both die of fentanyl ingestions.” I said, you know, enough is enough and I had written an article called When the Lion Kills your child about how heroin now percolated into middle America, suburban America.
And that’s when I sort of said, enough’s enough. And I said, if nobody’s going to do anything about it, I’m going to do something about it.
And that’s when I hit the road, and I started going to college campuses and talking to the young people about the drug and alcohol abuse and risk-taking behaviors and explaining to them.
I said, one of the reasons they do these things is that they don’t understand the depth of love that a parent has for a child.
So channeling that sort of energy, that experience of nearly losing my son and trying to get out there in the world, And, you know, sort of honoring his strength and honoring sort of God in giving me my child back.
I said, I’m going to see if maybe I can keep some other parents’ kids from dying.
And so that’s what I do.

[14:26] You know, you don’t think that’s miraculous. You don’t think that’s transformative.
That’s I guess growth of a tragedy.
Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Lewis. I was in my head as you were talking, I’m thinking, how do I summarize this?
But you summarized it very well there.
But there’s this very, very important, tragic event with your son which brought you to new levels of understanding of love and appreciation for life and also an awareness of strength in him as well as an awareness of community and how the impact of his illness, what that had on everybody.
For you personally deepening your awareness of what it’s like to be ill, what is it like to be a young person, what’s it like to be a parent of a young person that is in dire situation, or having more empathy for those parents whose kids died of the drug overdose, and how that miraculously shifted you into doing even more work in the community level to prevent that.

[15:32] Sure, sure. Yeah, so very nice. And so what I wonder, by the way, can we just chat about what was that charcoal grill incident?
I’m intrigued.
It’s actually a really fascinating story. We’ll be right back in.
Back in the early 80s, when I was trying to become a medical student, I was at Indiana University, and I was trying to get this sort of special honors degree. At that time, it was molecular biology. It was a core biology program. And I was doing this long-term paper on immunology, and it was a beautiful day out. It was in February, and I’d been working on this paper for ages. And I decided I’m going to take my computer out onto the porch and finally put this whole thing together. Now realize, I mean, I don’t know how old you are, Dale, but I got a feeling you’re about the same age as me. You’re close. Okay. Pushing 60.

[16:26] And so back then, you know, you’re talking about a candy 1000. It’s a huge, you know, computer screen with a, you know, giant, you know, the hard drive component that has like nine feet of Laffy Taffy cord that goes to the top matrix printer.
And then the keyboard is the size of a Prius, and so you’ve got to bring all this out onto the porch.
And I get this whole thing set up, and I’ve got this whole stack of papers, and I’m putting this thing all together.
And the girls in the apartment right above me, they didn’t realize I was sitting on the porch below them and they dumped a hibachi to clean out a hibachi over the rail of their uh, when the hibachi fell, all the ash fell right on top of me, right into the processing unit and the whole computer just blew up.

[17:23] I was a relatively smart guy, but I hadn’t backed up anything on my computer.
It was all on the hard drive, and back then you had these big floppy disks, remember?
I’m covering, I’m screaming, I’m like, oh my gosh, and they’re so apologetic.
Meanwhile, there were these two guys tossing a football in the common area, and they see this whole thing happen.
One guy comes over, they’re laughing, and I’m just going crazy, and they’re dusting all this ash off of me and everything like that. And I said, no, I said, I’m, I said, they go, you’re going to be okay. It’s just not that my papers destroyed. I’ve been working on this. In meantime, the one guy’s picking up the papers and he’s flipping through them and he goes, what is this stuff that you’re working on? I said, and I had never met the guy. And I said, it’s immunology. And he says, he goes, you know, I love immunology. I said, Well, nobody loves immunology.
And he goes, listen, he goes, I’ve got this computer, it’s called a Mac.
And I think it was the first time I’ve heard of the word Mac.
He goes, you know, I’m interested in this stuff. Why don’t you just bring your pile of papers?
Let me see if I can help you piece this article, this paper together for you.

[18:34] And I said, really? And he, and we took it to his apartment and we sat there for like the next five or six hours.
And this guy, his name’s Joe Tector, helped me put together my entire term paper on his computer and he understood the terminology and I sat there and pretty much read notes to him while he typed it in and got it all re-established.

[18:55] Well Joe tells me that he’s pre-med too and I’d never met him but I liked him immediately.
I’m pre-med too and he says, it’s a year behind me, he says his goal one day is to go to medical school and he wanted to get a PhD in immunology.
Then he wanted to do a residency in general surgery, then he wanted to do a fellowship and transplant, and that one day he was going to try to put pig organs into a human being.

[19:20] He tells me all of this, he’s a junior in college, and I remember writing all that stuff down on Roy Immunology book that I was using at the time, and I gave it to Joe.
Well, Joe is now on the cusp of getting FDA approval to put the first viable renal xenograft pig kidney into a human being.
He’s one of the most celebrated liver and kidney transplant surgeons in the world today, of the Utah and Miami.
So Joe Calls me out of the blue. We keep in contact. We were you know, just best of friends. He’s like a brother I’ve never had we keep in contact and he reaches out to me out of out of Miami when he was in fellowship And he says hey, can I come live at your house for a little while in Indiana?
And I said, well, what about your kids and wife is everything? Okay, cuz I don’t know everything’s fine He goes I’m gonna move to Indiana. You guys aren’t using your livers. I said, what do you mean?
He goes, well, I keep taking your livers from Indiana, bringing them down here to Miami and putting them into people down here, which means that you guys aren’t doing enough liver transplants up there.
So I figured I’d come up and expand the liver transplant program at Indiana.
And he goes, well, my wife has to sell the house and we got to get the kids finished the semester. I said, yeah, come on in, live in my house.
So he lives in my house for a few months.

[20:38] And one night, middle of the night, like about three o’clock in the morning, Joe calls me up at the hospital and he says, what are you doing? I said, what do you mean what I’m doing?
I’m at work. He said, are you at the med center? Because he was actually at a different hospital.
He goes, yeah, I just did a liver. He goes, I was driving back, wanted to see if you wanted a cup of coffee. And I said, yeah, grab me a cup at the Speedway gas station. Brings a cup of coffee to the ER probably like three, four o’clock in the morning. Around the same time, there was a general surgeon in there by the name of Josh Koretsky, and he’s a pediatric surgeon. And I said, hey, Josh, I want you to meet a buddy of mine. This is Joe Tector. He just moved here from from Miami. He’s taken over, He’s a liver and kidney adult, pediatric liver and in kidney transplant surgeon from Miami and.

[21:25] I said he’s also looking at maybe doing in pediatric intestinal transplants and Josh goes intestines They do intestinal transplants and Joe goes. Well, we’ve done one in Miami and we think it might work work, I may do something down the line here.” He goes, oh, you know, it’s nice to meet you.
And they sort of go on their way. And Joe heads on back to my place, and about, I don’t know how much time transpired, a month or two months later, Josh Koretsky gets a kid that comes in to him with an acute abdominal issue.
And the kid is horribly sick.
They take him to the operating room, because I think he was two years old, open him up, and he had a malrotation of his entire testicle tract. And so it was all dead.
The entire GI tract was dead.
So he closes the kid back up, goes out to tell the parents that the child is going to die and there’s nothing they’re going to be able to do for him.

[22:24] And the mother starts crying and there’s nothing you could do.
I mean, they can’t do transplants or anything.
And Josh is like, no, they don’t. And then he sort of pauses. Wait a minute.
And he gets on the phone, he calls the med center and he calls, reaches Joe Tector and he says, Hey, I don’t know if you remember me, but you, I met you in the ER.
Friend of Lou Profetti’s. Oh yeah, I remember. He goes, well, here’s what I got.
He goes, you know, I’m fairly certain there’s nothing you can do.
We’re just going to do palliative care and let this kid go. And Joe says, why don’t you send him to me?
Let’s see what we can do.
Joe gets approval to do an emergency, the approval to do an intestinal transplant, this kid.
And does like a, I don’t know if he does a multivis, or he does an entire intestinal transplant in this little boy.
And I can’t remember, I think he was at that time harvesting a liver from another child and got on the phone and said, hey, bring the entire GI tract with you.
And so they bring the whole GI tract and they drop it in this kid.

[23:21] And I’ve mentioned it before, his parents have given me approval to talk about him, but David Peck is now in his 20s, and this little boy, and he was the first pediatric intestinal transplant, and he became the face of organ transplant in the state of Indiana.
So in the first pediatric intestinal transplant done.
So the question is, those girls hadn’t dumped that charcoal grill on my head and pulled it out of my computer back in the 80s, would David Peck still be alive today?
And now the answer is no, you wouldn’t be.
None of that would have transpired. So the miracle of having my term paper destroyed, or the tragedy of my term paper being destroyed translates into a young boy surviving to get an intestinal transplant 20 years later, or what, how many, 10, 15 years later?
So yeah, sometimes we have to let tragedies play themselves out.
Wow. That is quite a story. I’m glad I asked. And I, I, what I connect there is there’s the, the steps in the connection that made all that happen.
And you are a connector, your person that brings people together also.

[24:34] Part of that. Yeah. Also there there’s another lesson in there that if you’re not willing to open yourself up to other people and make connections, okay, and get to know people.
That’s part of the miracle too. I mean if Josh Kuretsky isn’t open to meeting my friend Joe and talking about him if he isn’t You know so egotistical that he won’t reach out and ask help People aren’t able to open their minds a little bit and create connections with other individuals especially in today’s age where everybody is is, marginalized in the geopolitical camps, you know if you’re not open to being friends with people that don’t look like you, pray like you, vote like you, think like you, man, you are just, you are really hurting yourself. You’re really, and you’re hurting the world too.
And you have to be open to connecting with other people no matter what their walks are in life.
So, Lewis, that’s quite a story, and I appreciate your comments about that also, about connecting and being open.
And I want to bring us back to the, just to kind of close us out, bring us back to this concept of your prescription for success, that, you know.

[25:49] Noting that there’s miracles underneath, inside the tragedy, just like your computer getting dumped on.
By the way, you left out the part about the very heavy monitors in those days.
I’m over here going, how did you get the monitor out there?
Those things were really heavy. digging in your forearms, carrying them out.
Yeah, I’m impressed that you did that. Anyway, when you turn that into a prescription for success, it makes me think, is there something for listeners, for us all to do when we are in the midst of tragedy?
What are your thoughts about that?
Well, I mean, fortunately, most of your listeners probably don’t have to go through what I do.
When I’m in the face of tragedy, I pretty much shrug my shoulder and go, hey it ain’t cancer. I mean that’s a good it’s a good starting point but a lot of of it requires I think you have to practice it and what I mean by That is that you just start picking out you know to begin with I think that if you start looking at some of the events in your life, some of the quote tragic events or events that you thought were real tragic in your life and then say okay what did i learn from that how did that help me how did that help me grow.

[27:04] And you start to realize that the vast majority of those events in your life actually weren’t as bad as you thought, And just be retrospective at some of those events to start.
And then as the tragedies come up, I think that the blows get softened a little bit.
You realize that most of that stuff is fixable. If it’s not your health.

[27:26] Almost everything else has a solution to it.
Okay, it may take a little bit of work to get to, but I don’t care if it’s financial, I don’t care if it’s relationship.
Almost every other outside of a life-changing illness or a death.

[27:42] Everything else has some sort of fix to it. And even those things a lot of times have a fix to it. You just, it may take a little work and it may take you connecting with other people who have been through sort of similar events, but most stuff is fixable. And I think in medicine we learn that too.

[28:03] Yes, I think those of us privileged enough to be in medicine are able to say, at least it’s not cancer, because we know what that can mean.
What you’re speaking to is kind of a perspective taking, it’s like in the grand scheme of things, how tragic really is this, what I’m going through right now, and if you can have a perspective.
The thing in my life that is going to be more right now, knock on wood, it’s going to be be worse. It has been worse in my life than finding out my kid had cancer. And I hope that that is the worst thing that ever happens in my life. Okay? If it is, then I’m truly blessed.
And, you know, I’ve talked about this too before in the past, and this is, it sort of touches base a little bit on sort of the tragic notion, is that we need to exercise our souls a little bit, too, on sort of the beauty notion of life, and Del, you know there’s a prayer in Judaism called the Shehekianu, which is essentially, Bless thou, O Lord our God, rule.

[29:13] Of the universe who brought us to this day.
And I really believe it’s.

[29:19] What that prayer is about is exercising your soul on a daily basis and looking around at very simple things, just the beauty of a tree outside or the smile of a random stranger, any number of a thousand things that you see on a daily basis that you tend to walk past and you don’t impart on your soul.
I really think that if you exercise your soul a little bit more to appreciate small moments in your life, then it dulls down some of the tragic stuff in your life too.
So you have to exercise your soul on literally a day-to-day, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour basis to appreciate little things around you.
And whether it’s saying a prayer inside your mind or just being cognizant and holding onto an image, that requires work.
And you have to do that daily.
And I think it helps keep your sanity and it makes the world look a little nicer around you too.
Yeah, and I guess that’s beautiful.
I love what you said about that is, you know, that’s a muscle too.
It’s a gratitude muscle. And in a way, using your language about miracles is noticing these miracles that are all around us. Absolutely.

[30:34] Yeah, awesome. Well, Louis, this has been great. And before we finish, I just, is there anything else about this topic that you’re thinking of right now that you wish to impart to our listeners that I haven’t asked you about?
I don’t know.
I’m, you know.

[30:53] This is a beautiful world, this is a beautiful country, and the people that are in it are, for the most part, very good and beautiful people, with souls, with hearts, and there’s so much negativity out there in the news, in the world.
Listen, I work in a level one trauma center through the middle of a COVID pandemic.
You know, if I’m telling you this world is a good place and the people are fundamentally good, it is, okay?
And you just have to be a part of it, you have to be open to it, and it requires all of us sort of working together and coming together and appreciating everybody’s differences.

[31:35] That makes it all real special in the end.
Pete T. Lewis, those are really wonderful words to close us out.
So once again, I want to just thank you again for taking the time to be a guest with us today and returning to the MD Coaches family of podcasts. So thanks again, Louis.
Thank you so much for having me, and have a good day. I really enjoyed this delightful conversation with Dr. Louis Profeta.
He invites us to view tragedy a little differently than we might be doing right now.
We should fully experience the emotions of such life events and also be open to how this life event informs us and may indeed hide a miracle.
So my takeaways this week are, one, while tragic describes how you feel at a given moment of difficult life events. The miracle underneath is how the event changed you.
In essence, challenging life events are transformative. 2. The more one realizes the growth that occurs as a result of tragedy.

[32:44] The softer subsequent blows become as you progress through life.
3. In the face of difficulty, be willing to connect with others.
As Dr. Profetas said, that’s part of the miracle too. And number four, practice noticing the small and large aspects of beauty all around us.
This too enables the shift from tragedy to miracle.
Well that’s it for this episode of Life Changing Moments. Remember if you’re struggling or just a little dissatisfied with your professional life or interested in becoming a better leader, consider hiring a coach.
You can find us at MyMDCoaches.com.
As always, thank you for listening and be well.

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