Thanksgiving, Kern Cookies, and Gratitude

From the 11/27/2020 newsletter

 

Director’s Corner

Thanksgiving, Kern Cookies, and Gratitude 

Adina Kalet, MD, MPH

This week Dr. Kalet waxes philosophical about Kern Cookies. 

As I write a Director’s Corner for this, our 35^th issue of the weekly Transformational Times, Drs. Alicia Pilarski and Kathlyn Fletcher have organized the distribution of Kern Institute Cookies to our colleagues and trainees who are working in our Milwaukee-based hospitals over the Thanksgiving holiday. As COVID-19 cases continue to surge, we do what we can to remind each other that we care. These cookies are a symbol of our gratitude for our colleagues, trainees, students, and friends’ service, commitment, and sense of duty.

 

Ah, cookies! Try not to smile – even if ironically – imagining handmade three-inch vanilla disks, covered in white royal icing, and decorated in pastel colors with delicately-penned, inspiring words and virtuous character traits: Thankful. Gratitude. Family. Blessed.

 

A local baker, Metcalfes Market Bakery, creates these works of art for us. Because of COVID, each cookie is in its own individual cellophane envelope, ostensibly ensuring everyone’s health and safety, but I think this makes them even more special and transportable. I hope our students and residents put a couple in their pockets and find them later (hopefully still edible!) when they least expect.  We hope their sweetness brings on the smiles and jokes that characterize doctor and nurse’s station camaraderie when the work seems endless and particularly difficult.

 

Kern Institute cookies have been a long-standing popular treat at MCW and we have continued distributing the cookies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as a gesture of gratitude and to remind our colleagues that we are thinking of and caring about them.

 

We will also deliver some cookies to our generous benefactors at the Kern Family Foundation who have made the work of the Kern Institute possible. We understand that Mr. Robert D. Kern likes these cookies, and we hope to bring something delicious to him, his family, and friends on this strangest of Thanksgiving holidays.

 

I personally am deeply grateful to the foundation for believing and investing their resources and time in us. They have “put wind in our sails” and have made it possible for us to reimagine how we educate physicians. I hope that, in the many accumulated pages of our Transformational Times, we have given our readers a detailed and nuanced sense of how we are approaching this work.

 

There are many of you who, sadly, have yet to taste one of our fabulous cookies. For all of you – our MCW Leaders, those in Academic Affairs who keep the medical school on track, those in MCWAH that keep our residency training programs running, our fellow educators and staff at MCW-Central Wisconsin and MCW-Green Bay, to our students, residents and staff – we are profoundly grateful. We will be sure to have cookies on-hand and ready for you when we can gather again face-to-face.

 

While we all would love to be – and by rights, should be able to be – together this weekend, we will not travel or expose our loved ones to the highly infectious and potentially deadly virus. We will stay home because we want our hospitals and health care professionals to be there, ready, and able to care for those who will need it most. This self-sacrifice is lifesaving! We must all do our part.

 

But, self-sacrifice does not mean you can’t eat some cookies. Our thanks go out to every one of you. 

 

 

Adina Kalet, MD, MPH, is the Director of the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education and holder of the Stephen and Shelagh Roell Endowed Chair at the Medical College of Wisconsin.