12
doc • Summer 2015
Kentucky
Profile in Compassion
Compassion is what
sustains me
Carol Cottrill
By John A. Patterson
M.D., MSPH, FAAFP
It seems so fitting that
Carol Cottrill’s medical
specialty is the hearts of
children- both physical and
emotional. Her career path began when her
4th child was born with congenital heart
disease.
Growing up on a family farm, she learned
to balance compassion and necessity, a skill
she would use in caring for her daughter and
later during 18 years as medical director of
UK’s pediatric ICU. Her daughter’s illness
introduced her to wonderfully compassionate doctors and nurses who cared for sick
children as their life’s work.
When her daughter died after Cottrill’s first
year of medical school, she felt isolated from
her classmates, who did not know how to
talk to her about death, dying, loss and grief.
She finally took the initiative, reached out to
them and felt comforted.
She learned how to practice compassionate medicine more from relationships with
classmates and patients than from the formal
medical curriculum. She says, ‘whether it’s
a fellow student or a patient, you have to
become human to one another. People need
to know you’re on their side. You do that
with compassion. Compassion is when we
both put a part of ourselves out there and
we somehow touch one another.’
Cottrill worries about our growing reliance
on technology. ‘If you are looking at a computer instead of a patient’s eyes, both of you