Luisa Rovegno is beginning to write from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The variation of intimacy with which we enter into relationships with our patients necessitates the donning and doffing of our emotionally protective gear. When we practice patient-centered care, the roles we wear of educator, diagnostician, technician, guide, and/or partner are clear. When we move to relationship-centered care, and bring the role of personhood forward, we acknowledge that we benefit in serving the patient and that we are part of a reciprocal influence. We include both our personhoods. Yet, we do this cloaked in the garment of service. How much our personhood remains intact under that cloak often necessitates an agile dance between how much we reveal our vulnerabilities and how much we keep hidden.
Two poems in Intima have specifically referenced masks.
In “My First Mask Was a White Coat” (Spring 2021), Lauren Fields evokes the sense of our shifting personhood as we negotiate this role of service. “[T]o commune / in a meaningful meaninglessness / with people you desperately want / to trust,” and yet, to “exchange pleasantries / with the man in 421 as if / no one had ever died / in that room before, / as if no one ever would.” The “as if” of my interactions might hold the tension between my personhood and what I need to costume as I travel through my day. “As if” the intimacy I have with the patient I see at 8:00 doesn’t end as I walk into the room of the patient I am seeing at 8:15. Yet, “as if” we don’t share intimacy again when one of them returns at 2 AM in labor.
“Plague Doctors“ (Fall 2021) by Carla Barkman elicits the uncertainty of the territory we travel and the uncertainty of what protective gear we will wear: “if our masks arrive.” And if our masks don’t arrive, would we be able to “hand out treats”? Is our ability to serve our patients, to acknowledge our underlying personhood, dependent upon being able to shield ourselves with some sort of mask or costume? Or must we shed ourselves in order to serve?
When I wrote “Costuming” (Spring 2022), I was remembering a patient’s response to a loss she had incurred. She acknowledged the loss, and with grace and generosity, understood she would accept that life goes on and that not everything was broken. It may have been a costume she was wearing as well, but she communicated that she needed me to be wearing the same.
Luisa Rovegno, whose work has appeared in Uppagus, is beginning to write from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.