Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Yung Family Cancer Center at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, President-Elect of the Association of Cancer Care Centers, and Editor in Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“The Surplus of Blessing
‘The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.’ – Gandhi.
I need to share something that happened recently here at St. Elizabeth Physicians, at a time when most of my social media feeds are full of divisive politics and sad news. This is the exact opposite.
Dr. Laura Barczewski, a beloved family physician in our health system, donated her kidney to a child she’s never met and will likely never know.
Here’s the part that I think is even more amazing: when she learned she wasn’t a match for the specific child whose sign she’d seen while out running, she didn’t walk away satisfied that she’d tried. She recalibrated. ‘I didn’t know that kid,’ she said, ‘so I’m like, well, I’ll just give it to another kid.’ She entered a national donor chain instead.
No fanfare. No social media campaign. Just a quiet choice to schedule major surgery, accept real risk, and give away something irreplaceable to maximize the chance that ‘someone’s child would live.
Someone asked her if her demanding work – seeing patients day after day, year after year – was enough contribution to the world. Her answer: ‘Well, yes, but I do believe that if you have a lot of blessings in your life and good things in your life, then you should do something with it.’
Most of us have earned the right to say our work is enough. We’re busy, we’re contributing, we’re trying our best. Dr. Barczewski had too. But she asked herself a dangerous question anyway: ‘What should I do with my blessings?’
Not ‘Am I successful?’ Not ‘Have I done enough to feel good about myself?’ But rather – do my blessings create capacity for something beyond what’s expected of me?
The values we don’t schedule are just wishes. She put hers on the calendar.
I wrote about what her story taught me about grace, intentionality, and why this kind of radical selflessness matters more than ever right now. It’s a reflection on the surplus of blessings and what becomes possible when we stop letting ‘good enough’ be the ceiling.
This is the content I want more of in my feed. Stories of magnified goodness. Acts that restore faith.
Evidence that kindness still scales.
Well done, Laura. You are an inspiration to us all.”
More posts featuring Douglas Flora.