Physician Healing After Illness:
Dr. Rana Awdish on Reinhabiting the Body and Leading With Self-Compassion

Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast — Episode 113: The After Shock of Healing with Dr. Rana Awdish. Host Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP interviews guest Dr. Rana Awdish, MD, critical care physician and pulmonologist at Henry Ford Health. Published June 15, 2026.

Rana Awdish: I had internalized medicine's value system that saw the value of my body as the labor it could extract from it. And if my body wasn't complying, then it was a bad body. And acceptance is really hard when you don't realize that's not your own value system, that you're really using this very capitalist sort of mindset on yourself.

Lillian Emlet: She was cured. The numbers were good. The crisis had passed, and by every metric medicine had, she had survived. And yet she felt like a stranger inside her own body, a body she had been trained as a physician see as a broken object to be fixed. And my guest today, Dr. Rana Awdish, is a critical care physician pulmonologist who nearly died in her own ICU and then spent years discovering that surviving and healing are not the same thing. One is something that happens to you, and the other is something you have to choose. This is the Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast, and today we're talking about what it really means to come back to yourself. And so Rana, thank you so much for being here.

Rana Awdish: So happy to be with you. Thank you

Lillian Emlet: So I just want to introduce everyone to you. You're very near and dear to my heart for the last 20 years. we grew up together really in our critical care, field. But, Rana is a pulmonologist and critical care physician at Henry Ford, in Detroit. And she's medical director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program and, medical director of the care experience for the healthcare system. And, in 2008, in the final days of your critical care fellowship, and also you were, I think, pregnant at the time, you had, an experience with, being critically ill, that you talked about in your first book, In Shock. after that experience, you've built so many things in terms of your communication skills training. And we're here now because your second book is out, After Shock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness. And so we're really grateful for the opportunity to get to read your next book and to also chat a little bit what it's like to be, in life with healing and writing and painting and being a physician and being a teacher and being a leader for your healthcare system.

Rana Awdish: Thank you. I'm looking forward to it

Lillian Emlet: So you've written before that medicine has trained you to see a sick body as a broken object to be fixed. And when You became the patient, where did that framework sort of first fall for you?

Rana Awdish: it's interesting. I don't think I realized how much medicine had trained me to regard sick bodies as broken objects until I found myself living in a body that couldn't really be fixed. You mentioned my early critical illness. I had hemorrhagic shock from a ruptured hepatic adenoma that just caused multi-system organ failure, and there were a lot of sequela that came from that. I kind of had recurrent chronic critical illness. I was in and out of the hospital with sepsis. I had deficits left from the hypoperfusion to my organs, including my brain. And I revered medicine so much at that point that I kind of figured however far it could get me, that was how healed I was going to be, and I didn't really know how much that would still leave undone. And so when I found myself, for all intents and purposes, really a heroic save from a medicine perspective, but in this body that felt like a ticking time bomb where I didn't know when a pain meant, another admission or another urgent surgery or a catastrophic hemorrhage, I really had to almost learn how to communicate with my body again. Because as to function as a critical care physician, we live in our heads. We become very disembodied. We ignore our hunger and our need for sleep, and that disembodiment combined with medicine's objectification and really pity of chronically ill bodies, distanced me. It estranged me from my own

Lillian Emlet: Yeah It's really wonderful that you can articulate that so clearly because I don't think people really realize they're, that they are this disembodied. In fact, many clinicians carry this unspoken belief that they should be able to power through their own suffering, through anything. They really truly just try to ignore and actually, don't even wanna talk about it in even just our office spaces. so how did that belief and sort of that environment where everyone else like, just goes about their business, continues to preach this sort of unspoken narrative about not caring or feeling or acknowledging or even talking about it with others, that feeling aspect afterwards?

Rana Awdish: Yeah, the way it showed up for me was a lot of shame. If I got admitted and need my colleagues to cover me, I felt ashamed. If I couldn't parent the way I thought I should at home and I had to rely on my husband or my mom, I felt less than worthy as a parent. I had internalized medicine's value system that saw the value of my body as the labor it could extract from it. And if my body wasn't complying, then it was a bad body. And acceptance is really hard when you don't realize that's not your own value system, that you're really using this very capitalist sort of mindset on yourself

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. and it's really hard, I think. I mean, I actually even need to text a colleague, later today because she's had been having unstable angina, and she confided in me, and I'm like, "You need a cath immediately with your family history." And she's just putting it off, and now she thought about showing up for her shift today, but going post call into her cath. And I'm like, "That's ridiculous. It's called no." And I think the other thing that leaders really need to do is that they need to acknowledge and be aware that leadership plus wellbeing means that when you tell your scheduler or you tell your supervisor these things are happening in your life, they just delete your

Rana Awdish: Yeah

Lillian Emlet: for you. That they just take it from you and just be like, "We're not gonna let you be strange." Like to have these role model bad things for our group, because then it sort of trickles, right? Well, if you can be this heroic or this pretend armor of like not noticing and behaving incorrectly for the rest of the group, this actually says something about the whole facility actually.

Rana Awdish: It's still valorized as much as we don't claim to, have those values. You'll see it everywhere, people saying, "Oh, I got surgery and two days later I was rounding with an IV attached and it was fine." It's not fine.

Lillian Emlet: No.

Rana Awdish: actually a terrible example of self-care or self-compassion. It's not resilience. It's just neglect. I'm sorry. And we have to really reverse that narrative

Lillian Emlet: Right. I do think, whenever, I re- I, you probably remember the days when we had our Vital Talk communication courses. We used to end our courses with makes you feel like a healer? And it's really interesting to sort of be so far away in

Rana Awdish: Yeah

Lillian Emlet: lives with these unspoken rules of valor, of disembodiment, of not acknowledging of just humanity, and not talking about it. I mean, it's one thing to ask others to, to help out. That's a very, committed level of a relationship that you would ask your partners, your family at work, your family at home to be able to support you. That's one level of trust. But we don't even talk about it, like in terms of how could I brainstorm ways to solve this things? Who else could I ask, to be able to just be a different role model, be a different leader, and to make it transparent that these are normal life events, and we should talk about it? And it's interesting 'cause I think the next generation really is craving it and needing it. Our fellows are telling us that we don't understand and we feel really disconnected from you, as a

Rana Awdish: Yeah

Lillian Emlet: that you and I both are at this point now. don't feel connected to us anyway 'cause we are unwilling to show our humanity

Rana Awdish: That's powerful. That's really useful feedback. I've learned a lot from this generation of physicians. They're really unwilling to work in service of values that they do not have for themselves. They believe their time should be compensated, which is like novel to us, where we just said it was altruism and donated all of our time in service of whatever the health system needed. They have boundaries, and that can be a word that has negative connotations, but I've seen it really help them to flourish because they're not just laying themselves at this altar of medicine in a self-sacrifice hoping that it gives them something back that's worth it

Lillian Emlet: Right. And at the same time, they really do want to be shown ways to give and show ways that are transparent to like this is the reason why you want to work hard because this is the reward you get." It's just that none of us have really explained why is it worth is it worth doing these academic projects, or why is it worth, helping the system, in a fair and equitable way that's

Rana Awdish: Yeah. And I think it can be really hard for older physicians, which I count myself among, to separate out what aspects of their training made them who they are and which ones were just kind of cruelty for cruelty's sake or for the system's benefit. we tend to think, in fearful terms of like, "But what if they never do a 36-hour call? Like, how will they know?" And you're like, was that really that useful in your education, or do you just need to hold that up because it's something that you suffered through

Lillian Emlet: Yeah And I think also we have to be more patient with the process. I think, when we think about our memories of how we learned, I mean, AI's going to become the next great equalizer. We have no idea and we are into uncharted territories. And so I think that to kind of move into how do we know, whether it is with AI or it is with, like, lived experience of being in the hospital 24 to 36 hours, when we know with our own bodies, that is really hard for many of us. And so,

Rana Awdish: Mm-hmm.

Lillian Emlet: you alluded at some point that your body started to warn you that it might begin to have issues, and you start, you decided to stop trusting your cognitive side, the certainty, and started to trust your own self and your body and the sensations. Walk us through what made that shift possible.

Rana Awdish: Yeah you know, I'd done a lot of work, as you said, after my experience of critical illness. I had developed communications curriculums based on vital talk for our health system. I developed a lot of things to right the wrongs that I had seen. And it was really interesting because at the time it felt very, restorative. And in retrospect, I can see that it was such a doctor way of handling it, of like my body had become terrifying, so I flipped into a fix-it mindset and just directed my gaze at the culture and was like, "Where can I affect change?" Rather than having to deal with the trauma of a sick body. And when I began to notice that estrangement, I started to look for tools that I could use to kind of go back in. I had always practiced yoga, but I went deeper into that practice. I found it really helpful to do trauma-informed yoga that was more of a yin practice, a slower practice, where we were encouraged to remain in poses and just notice the sensations as they arised without judgment. And that kind of sustained non-judgmental awareness of my body was something I'd never really done. I'd always reacted with a kind of panic at signals or a suppression, right, if I was working. And instead to just notice it and hold it and give it space was so novel. I went deeper into the creation of art. I tried meditation and mindfulness. I even tried embodiment through puppetry. Anything that would kind of bring me into my body, not as a place to fear, but a place to live. And it became really interesting. I started, trusting it differently. There were mistakes that I made, of course. I remember trying to meditate through a small bowel obstruction because it was in the middle of COVID and I didn't wanna go to the hospital. We didn't have any beds, and I thought I could just breathe through the waves of pain instead of, accepting that I needed an exploratory laparotomy and lysis of adhesions. so I made mistakes along the way, but I also learned to regulate my emotions differently And then we started to be in conversation. And, about five years into that re-embodiment quest, this message surfaced from my body when I was in the middle of PH clinic, and it just was clear as day. It said, "I'll be dead in five years." And I couldn't tell you where it came from, but it was undeniable. And instead of doing what I would have done before, which is suppress it or negate it with objective evidence, or try to run from it or have wine, I sat with it and let it lead me, and we ended up finding a cancer that I didn't know I had. And ultimately, that relationship with my body saved my life

Lillian Emlet: That, no, that is very deep in terms of being able to notice and feel. People are, very few people are able to actually have that relationship with their body. Most of us ignore... I mean, we see this all the time in healthcare. People ignore things way too long and are able to suppress. And so the fact that you give name to this hopefully will help another healthcare professional out there who has been ignoring. And I, whenever we work our, with our clients, the first thing that has to happen is coming back to your own physiology, and that's your mental and physical physiology, to decide how am I going to be? And being is enough

Rana Awdish: And I've done all of the permutations of it. Like I can tell you, ignoring things doesn't work real well. Meditating through an abdominal emergency doesn't work real well. But there are places to apply these techniques where it is really helpful and can reunite you so that you have a heightened interoceptive awareness of what's happening, and you can use that to guide you. I think as physicians sometimes we operate in very stressful environments, and even just a tuning to my own first sensations of overwhelm rather than waiting until I kind of snap at someone or I'm short with someone, but to notice like, " Oh, I'm starting to get irritated when someone's taking a long time to tell me a story." That's usually my first sign because I feel such time compression that I don't genuinely feel I can listen the way that I want to. And that's a cue for me to deescalate it right there before it starts to impact other people

Lillian Emlet: I think, most of us would probably say we're not working at that degree of capacity. I would say that probably most of us are really reactive most of the time. And even if you do have a faith-based or a mindfulness practice, it's very easy to get buffeted by, life in general. And, there's clinicians who are listening who I think they, they are, crying inside right now. They're like, "I'm actually pretty numb." "I am complete extreme." And the two of us talking really are probably making them very uncomfortable. so if you're someone who's listening, what would you say to someone like that who's really has every wall yeah like, doesn't even wanna... I mean, they're the people who we know, like in the wellbeing things, they really just, they just sort of, don't even wanna talk about things. What is one concrete thing they can do this week to begin just moving a little bit towards being okay with reinhabiting their own experience, savoring being in their own

Rana Awdish: Yeah One of the earliest practices that I integrated for myself was just a process of attunement of at the end of the day, driving home, commuting home, however you go home, reflecting and noticing one moment in the day that felt good in my body. Simple. A moment where I felt comfortable. And often, that was a really simple moment with a patient who was sharing a story or a picture of their grandchild or something that maybe wouldn't make my list of high impact or, like, certainly nothing that would make my CV, just this, like, really human moment. And when you start to do that, I think you can start to see patterns. And it might be like, I didn't feel good until I was outside walking the dog, and it might be I didn't feel good till I got home and was able to take off my clothes and get in the bath. Whatever it is, you can build in more of that and start to have more expanses of your day where your body feels safe and comfortable and you're in a controlled environment, and you can nurture that relationship

Lillian Emlet: I love that. I think also we would want to just acknowledge that there are so many people out there living with chronic pain and chronic, physical limitations, especially for our nursing colleagues who are listening, brought on by years of service in the healthcare industry. And so just acknowledging and leaning into it. It's very interesting with the mindfulness is to, again, not, again suppress it or talk it away or make excuses for it, but just to be okay with it. Because in some ways that pain and that experience is also part of your own beauty as well

Rana Awdish: Yeah I certainly can relate. I had terrible chronic pain for a decade. and there's the pain, and then there's the story you tell yourself about the pain. And when I would tell myself a story that meant something was happening that was bad, that some new disaster was coming, that I would never feel well, those stories amplified the pain. And when instead I could observe it and notice it, and accept that my body will have these sensations, it deescalated it. And, it just makes it safer to admit when you don't tie it to a story that's fear-based

Lillian Emlet: And I also would say probably for those who really believe in manifesting and to some degree what happens, the more we say these negative things to ourselves and to each other, and especially internally, we are all very guilty of saying negative things internally and never say it out loud even to our partners. Those things can become real. And so it is really important to catch that awareness and that attunement early to be able to stop that cycle for yourself before it gets out of hand I'm curious, because you do communication work and you do teach others how to be in those moments, and when you think about the training, and if people... our goal as physicians is to really make sure that we have a therapeutic alliance with anyone we're working with, whether it be another team member or a patient. These conversations of the way we approach interacting does make a difference. And so in your experience, and also with teaching clear conversations, are there small changes in how a physician or a clinician or a nurse practitioner, how they show up at the bedside that can make a difference for patients who are going through this, these issues with chronic pain, or just being okay with their body in that moment, in clinic or in the hospital?

Rana Awdish: I think two of the changes that I've found to be really transformational just in my own practice are releasing some of my need to control the agenda. we have so many metrics that we're tasked with and so many follow-up items that we can go into a visit kind of like ready to pounce with like, "These are all the things I need to get done." And we cannot really leave room for what's most important to the person whose visit it really is. Like, it's their visit, so their agenda really needs to be fleshed out and honored. And I find that when I do that, it releases some of my own self-judgment, because doctors are very self-critical, and we can feel like we need to be perfect and have the m- best titrated, goal-directed medical therapy for every single condition in every visit, the best outcomes, the best patient satisfaction. And the truth is, none of that might matter to your patient. Your goal-directed medical therapy might make them hypotensive and dizzy and not see their grandkids. Like, what do they care about? And so really releasing some of that power and redistributing it to the patient's very important. And then the just simple act of like reading the room. Notice, not just what's said, but how is it said, what's the emotion, decode it, respond to it, be there. And, I think these clinic rooms can be these kind of sterile places where someone can tell you the worst thing that's ever happened to them, and you can be like, "Okay, let's check your medication list." And it's like, no. Would you do that to someone on the street who just told you the worst thing that's ever happened to them? No, you would meet them as a human. And when we do that, we benefit, too. it's not normal to just act like we're there in this transactional way

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. I really love your explanation of really just being present. Being present, just being a person, first, and allowing space to see what comes out rather than... I love the pouncing for our own agenda. Yeah. It does happen so often because we are so stressed in terms of what needs to happen. And so I think also the reality is there's many healthcare professionals and leaders listening right now who feel like a stranger in their own life. And I think this applies even when you're a division chief and you're chair. You feel all these invisible burdens of metrics. the metrics get worse, I think, the higher up you get. The stakes feel bigger, and you sometimes to make time to do these more human connection pieces. What do you- what would you like leaders and leaders in development to know about they can take away from your new book

Rana Awdish: as a critical care physician, I'm shocked by how little I understood about the long tail of healing. I ironically could not attend to the same things in myself that medicine has a hard time attending to, like the emotional, spiritual aspects of healing, the grief, all of it, the disability, the shame. It was exactly like medicine. And having compassion for people's own timeline, for your own timeline, for building up slowly, I think we live in such a pressurized, rushed culture that just wants people to be better because it's more comfortable, and that's not always how it goes. So finding, compassion and space and gentleness even for yourself

Lillian Emlet: No, it's a really, it was a really great message. And I know a lot of people right now c- can't even imagine what it might look like to have compassion for yourself, especially with the leaders who feel very stressed with the conversations they might have to have, or the additional reports that may not get done on time, and anxiety over whether they'll be fired or let go in some way. And at the same time, how can you hold both, right? So I think both might be true, and both also might be completely untrue. And so honoring yourself first is, will always be in your best,

Rana Awdish: And I've had to play tricks on myself, to learn that kind of self-compassion. I will literally say, "What would you say to a friend in this circumstance? If a friend came to you and said, 'I'm not going to get my manuscript done by the deadline. I have childcare issues,' whatever it is, what would you say?" And inevitably you'd say, "Okay, the world won't end. Take a breath. It'll be there tomorrow.

Lillian Emlet: Right

Rana Awdish: Just be gentle with yourself." We are so much harsher on ourselves than we ever would be to anyone else we loved

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. I think it's also kind of amazing for us, especially in critical care, we lived, we somehow lived through the pandemic, the worst of the several waves it went through. And yet, this, we have now reverted back to where the way we were pre-pandemic, except even worse. We're more disconnected, we're more anxious, and we have forgotten the simplicity. I do find some ways the beauty of the pandemic was we just focused on truly only what really mattered. Because people were dying irregardless of what was happening, and we had to support each other. We had to be there for our teams. Everyone was hands on deck, and we were there for all of our families to the best our policies could, allow us to at the time. It was very simple. There was no stories. There was no... simplicity. And I suddenly that we have forgotten that this is actually the way we need to care for each other, even with the busy

Rana Awdish: Yeah. It really distilled medicine down to its barest elements. administration trusted us to make decisions on the ground. Documentation went out the window. No one cared about that. It was you take care of the people that come, and you take care of each other. And in so many ways, that's all we need to do

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. you say, simplicity is beautiful for a reason. Yeah. so you chose to embed uncertainty, and it ultimately saved your life. For the person who's afraid to take that kind of a leap, do you think becomes possible on the other side of it, and what advice do you have to give the rest of us who are thinking about leaps?

Rana Awdish: Certainty is very comfortable. It's also an illusion, right? Most of the things we think we're certain of, we end up reevaluating at another time, whether that's a career or the choice of a life partner. Certainly reevaluated all of those things. getting comfortable with uncertainty, learning to sit with what we don't know, is a skill, a muscle you can build like anything else, like your communication practices. That's one of the reasons I love, visual thinking strategies, exercises, and art, because you can't know what the artist intended. You have to sit with ambiguity. You have to wonder and be curious and ultimately walk away without resolution, and that's a really healthy thing to practice doing in a profession that prides itself on certainty

Lillian Emlet: That's such a good point. It's funny 'cause I started dabbling and started following some people on Substack who are all about illustrating and drawing and converting a career that's very cognitive into, more visual thinking and just visual description. So, it's a really great point that you bring out, that it's just the process of the making is enough. Yeah.

Rana Awdish: and engaging with something that you don't fully understand. It's okay

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. So Rana, thank you so much, for being here on the podcast. You've given everyone listening permission to admit that surviving alone is not the whole story. It's really about that process of healing and accepting and being more present in your own life, in your own body. and to imagine what coming home to yourself really, starts to look like as a, especially as a healthcare professional and a leader, and juggling all the things you love to do. family and celebrating all the things. So we want to let everyone know that your new book, Aftershock: Learning to Reinhabit My Body After Illness, is out on June 16th, and I have my pre-order coming in the mail hopefully. It's from St. Martin's Press. And also, if you haven't read Af- her first book, In Shock, is really an essential reading. It's actually in many medical schools as core, reading. If there's any thoughts you have, Rana, to share with our audience to conclude our episode, what would you like to say?

Rana Awdish: I think one thing we didn't touch on is community. No one heals alone. And as you rightly pointed out during the pandemic, we relied on each other. We all need someone we can text when we're having a bad day, to grab a coffee and have a listening ear before we kind of reach our limit. So grow your community by being part of it

Lillian Emlet: so important. You're right. We did, we definitely did not do it alone. I think motherhood taught me that you can't do this alone. Yeah. And so where can people find you, Rana? And how can people book you or for a reading, or what do you have in terms of what would be helpful to promote the book and get it into hands of more readers?

Rana Awdish: Yeah, I have a website, just my name, renaottoshmd.com. I keep a lot of my writing and podcasts there, and one day will update with where I'll be

Lillian Emlet: Great. Yeah, so we are look for- looking forward to see you, throughout the country on your book tour. And

Rana Awdish: Thank you

Lillian Emlet: reading, plea- we'll have the link to, purchase the book in the show notes below, and please share with a friend and a colleague. If you have leaders in your, organization that is looking for a new book for their book club for, discussions for their medical school and the medical humanities, please check out, Rana's new book and her first book, Aftershock and In Shock. Thanks everyone for listening, and tell us about what you want us to talk about, podcast@transforminghealthcarecoaching.com. Bye everyone.