Dr. Karen Wyatt Founded the End-of-Life University after a Tragic Incident Ep. 14

Dr. Karen Wyatt founded the End-of-Life University. Hear how her father's suicide lead her to learn about hospice and a career that focuses on helping educate people about end-of-life care. Contact End of Life University Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and for those who would like to follow along using the text. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked before quoting in print. Transcript Dr. Bob: On this episode, I'm speaking with Dr. Karen Wyatt. Dr. Wyatt is a family practice physician who specialized in hospice medicine for many years, and more recently has created the End of Life University, which is an online site that provides education and tools for people to learn about and become more comfortable with approaching end of life and having the most peaceful and dignified end of life possible. She's also an author, has written several books, including What Really Matters, Seven Lessons for Living From the Stories of the Dying. She also wrote a book called the Tao of Death and A Matter of Life and Death. She is a speaker and a great advocate for excellent, compassionate end of life care. During our interview, there were a couple of little connectivity issues, so there's a couple of very brief glitches. I hope it doesn't take away from the valuable content. You'll get some phenomenal insight and inspiration from this interview. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you, Karen, for being on our show today. Dr. Karen Wyatt: Hi, Bob. Thank you so much for having me. Dr. Bob: We had a chance to talk a couple of weeks age when I was interviewed for your podcast, and it was a great conversation. I think we both recognize that we have so much alignment, so many things in common regarding our careers and kind of where our priorities are, where our visions are trying to take us. You probably see this as well. Most of the people who are really passionate about providing great care for people at end of life have a personal experience or a personal story that kind of fuels their drive and their passion for that. I know you have one as well. Can you share a bit about how you became so aware of the importance of providing really phenomenal end of life care and making appropriate preparations? What's your story? Dr. Karen Wyatt: Yes. I'm happy to share that, Bob. It started for me a long time ago, when I was just a young doctor, brand new in medical practice, and I had trained in family medicine, but honestly had no training whatsoever in end of life issues. I hadn't received any ... at all around death and dying, which is shocking really when I look back and think about that. I really didn't have any knowledge or awareness of end of life issues and what was happening in that arena. But at that time I was in my early 30s, and my own father committed suicide, which was a horrific tragedy for me and my entire ... , but particularly devastating to me, because I was a doctor, because I had done extra training in psychiatry, just so that I could treat people with depression, and I had worked with some suicidal patients in my practice. The fact that I couldn't help my own father just completely tore me apart and really caused me to question, "Am I even a good doctor? Should I even be doing medicine?" I floundered for about three years with just overwhelming guilt and grief after my dad's death. One day I got the idea to call hospice, even though at that time I wasn't even really sure what hospice did. I knew so little about it, but this inspiration just popped into my head, "Call hospice." I called and had a chat with them, the hospice in my community, to see if I could volunteer in any way. It turns out their medical director had just resigned 30 minutes before I called, and so she said, "Actually, we have a job for you right now." Knowing almost nothing about hospice, or death and dying, or end of life care, I became a hospice medical director. From that moment on, my training started in really learning about dying. I was trained by the nurses. Our hospice at that time had nurses who had worked there for 10 and 15 years, caring for dying patients. I just followed them everywhere. I sat with them, and I just soaked up all this wisdom, and experience, and knowledge from them, all things that, looking back, I know I should have learned as a doctor. It was embarrassing that, as a doctor, I knew so little, but once I started making home visits to patients in hospice, I realized this is where I'm meant to be. This is the kind of medicine I was meant to do all along. I...