There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from washing dishes, Kevin Riggins will tell you, though not the satisfaction you might expect. He isn't talking about the meditative rhythm of hands moving through warm water, or the orderly progression from dirty to clean. He's talking about the satisfaction his patient felt when she realized she could stand at the sink without needing to rest in a chair, that her body had become strong enough to complete this most ordinary of domestic tasks without gasping for breath. "You won't believe what I did yesterday," she had said to him, her face transformed by a grin so wide it seemed to contain all the pride and wonder of a much greater accomplishment. And in a way, it did.
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Riggins, a clinical exercise physiologist and gerontologist who works in cardiopulmonary rehabilitation in New York, has built his career on understanding what most of us have the luxury of forgetting: that independence lives in the details. That the ability to move through one's own home without fear or exhaustion is not a given but a hard-won achievement. That what appears mundane from the outside can feel, from the inside, like reclaiming a piece of yourself you'd thought was lost.
The origins of this understanding are personal. Riggins grew up spending considerable time with his grandmother, and as he matured, he watched her world shrink in the way that often comes with age. The movements that had once been automatic became effortful, then uncertain, then sometimes impossible. But what struck him wasn't the decline itself. It was her perseverance, her determination to find ways around the obstacles her body placed before her. He found himself helping her navigate these challenges, finding solutions that would preserve her autonomy for as long as possible. In those moments, a sense of vocation took shape: helping other older adults navigate the same terrain.
It's a choice that contains within it a certain moral clarity. In a culture that worships youth and speed and the ease of moving through the world without effort, Riggins has oriented himself toward those for whom movement is neither easy nor assured. His patients are people whose bodies have been compromised by illness or age, whose breath comes short, whose muscles have forgotten their strength. They are not preparing to run marathons or climb mountains. They are preparing to wash dishes. To walk to the mailbox. To shower without assistance. To live, in other words, with dignity.
The moment with the woman who could finally wash her dishes marked a turning point in how Riggins understood his own work. He had entered healthcare knowing he would help people move better, a straightforward enough proposition. But this was different. This was about restoring not just function but meaning. He had expected her to report improvements the way patients usually do, perhaps mentioning that she didn't get as winded walking around her home. Instead, she offered him a window into what those improvements actually meant in the fabric of daily life. The things most people don't enjoy doing, the tedious tasks we'd happily avoid, had become, for her, precious evidence of capability. Riggins realized then that he wasn't simply restoring physical function but returning people to themselves.
This realization has shaped how he approaches his work. When he speaks about what advice he would give to those entering the field, he talks first about the importance of clinical experience, the necessary foundation of knowing how the body works. But then he pivots to something harder to teach: the capacity to put yourself in another person's shoes, to understand not just their symptoms but their lives. Empathy, he insists, will take you places you never imagined. It's a remarkable claim in an era when healthcare often feels like an exercise in mechanical efficiency, when patients become data points and care becomes protocol. Riggins is arguing for something more fundamental: the radical act of seeing people as they see themselves.
He defines being a healthcare professional as positively impacting the lives of people who may lack the motivation, support, or resources to manage their own health. There's a certain humility in this definition. He doesn't position himself as a savior but as a pillar, part of a larger architecture of care. Everyone plays an integral role, he says. The work is collaborative, interdependent. No one person changes a life alone. But together, the impact can be transformative.
What Riggins hopes for, what he works toward, is a fundamental shift in how we think about health itself. He wants to see healthcare move from reactive to proactive medicine, from treating illness to preventing it. It's a vision that sounds simple, almost obvious, until you consider how thoroughly our current system is organized around the opposite principle. We wait for people to get sick, then we intervene. Riggins wants to equip people with tools and resources before illness arrives, or at least before it takes hold completely. Health, he says, really is wealth. Without it, we don't have anything.
There's a quiet defiance in this insistence on prevention, on the value of the small, daily efforts that keep deterioration at bay. In a medical culture that celebrates dramatic interventions and miraculous recoveries, Riggins has chosen to work in the steadier world of daily care and gradual improvement. His victories are measured not in lives saved from the brink but in incremental gains that accumulate into something larger: a patient who can walk farther this week than last, who can breathe easier, who can stand at the sink and wash dishes without needing to sit down.
These are not the kinds of accomplishments that make headlines. But they are the accomplishments that make life livable, that allow people to remain in their homes, to care for themselves, to feel capable rather than dependent. Riggins has built his career on understanding that this matters, that these small restorations of function are worth dedicating a life to. His grandmother taught him that. His patients remind him of it every day.
In the end, Riggins's work is about translation. He takes the abstract language of physiology and exercise science and translates it into the concrete reality of daily life. He takes assessments and protocols and translates them into the ability to wash dishes, to climb stairs, to walk around the block. And perhaps most importantly, he takes despair and limitation and translates them, slowly and patiently, into possibility. Not the possibility of returning to youth or perfect health, necessarily, but the possibility of living with greater ease and autonomy in the body you have.
This is what it means, for Riggins, to be a healthcare professional: to stand alongside people in their struggle to remain themselves, to offer them not false promises but genuine support, to measure success not in dramatic transformations but in the accumulation of small victories. A woman standing at her sink, grinning, proud of something so ordinary it barely registers to anyone else. But to her, and to Riggins, it means everything.