Grief walks in many forms, and its footsteps are padded and quiet, imperceptible even, except to those who lay awake at night, counting its tip taps on the upper floor.
Read moreFinding the Human in Humanity. A reflection by Zoran Naumovski
I have been practicing medicine since completing my residency in June 2000. It baffles me that to this day I still hear comments from patients, families and loved ones that we physicians often cannot relate to their concerns, their health struggles and their ailments because we are doctors, because we harbor medical knowledge, because “we are not human.”
Read moreAt the End of a Call Shift, Who Gets to Go Home? A reflection by Angela Tang-Tan
Every now and then, at the end of a call shift, I leave the hospital with aching feet and heavy eyelids. And then I remember: I am the lucky one. I am the one who gets to go home. My patients – the grandfather whose kidneys are failing, the ten-year-old with meningitis – are not so lucky. They will not go home tonight. They may never go home again.
Read moreSearching for the Nugget of Connection by Kristin Graziano, DO, MPH, FAAFP
During the 10 years my mother spent in her nursing home two states away, I struggled with feelings of guilt and remorse. She suffered from dementia, requiring 24/7 care, and I couldn’t provide it to her. Yet there was always the plaguing thought that I should. I knew it wasn’t realistic. Still, I felt inadequate and like I abandoned her, even though I visited every few months.
Read moreThe Unexpected Labor of Caregiving by Ann E. Green
The poem titled, “To the Woman at My Mother’s Funeral Who Thought It Was So Lovely that My Mother Died at Home” by Kathryn Paul (Spring 2022 Intima, Poetry), circles around my mind days after reading it. Paul’s poem eloquently speaks back to the assumption that it is always good to die at home, that home deaths are always peaceful. The literal hands-on work of caregiving—the cleaning of blood, mucus, urine and feces — is unspoken and generally done by women, whether paid or unpaid, and the writer, who in her bio calls herself “a survivor of many things” captures this in her poem.
Read moreLearning to be Present for an Act of Dying by UCSF Medical Center professor Krishna Chaganti
It is the great privilege of medicine that we are asked to show up, constantly, albeit in a different role than a family member would be. To not look away is in the fabric of what we do. It is partly why the practice of medicine can be exhausting, electronic charting and reimbursement quibbles aside. We are asked as caregivers not to dispense always but to receive, to hear questions that we don’t want to reflect upon. It is our privilege to be present.
Read moreThresholds and Doorways: Exploring Mental Health Narratives Through Art by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed
© Beyond the Threshold Aubrey Reed Spring 2024 Intima
My first-ever clerkship rotation as a medical student immersed me in the realm of inpatient psychiatry. This profound and eye-opening experience blurred the boundaries between sickness and health. It challenged my preconceived notions and deepened my understanding of mental illness.
Read moreA Sestina in Honor of Tia Forsman’s “Remnant” by Lynn Lawrence
© Remnant 2 by Tia Forsman Spring 2022 Intima
“Radiographs serve as distilled moments of a human narrative,
An illness experience in greyscale” (From “Remnant” by Tia Forsman in the Spring 2022 Intima)
Sea glass/cutglass/eyeglass/stonefish/boomerang, Forsman’s remnants
Arrayed/x-rayed on the nightblack ocean floor of shapes and shadows.
From the French : to “rest”; to “remain”, “left over”; an underwater x-ray.
Overlapping, edges blurred, tenderly floating in an uncertain narrative.
This isn’t an x-ray. It just looks like one. Like medicine, a “grey area”
Forman is bilingual.. She paints in watercolor. She speaks in radiology.
Self-Examinations and the Burdens of Being Sick by Amanda Ford
Being sick takes work. There is the pain and exhaustion, the adaptation, the cognitive load required to keep moving forward when my body holds me back. There’s also the business of being a patient: sitting in waiting rooms, standing in line at the pharmacy, being on hold with the insurance company.
Read moreDoes one honor or diminish an elderly parent by insisting on the truth? A reflection by Davida Pines
Kristin Graziano’s “Contents Have Shifted” considers how best to respond to a parent’s dementia-inflected reality. “For years,” Graziano observes about her mother, “I felt compelled to refute her falsehoods. I felt that by correcting her, I could yank her back to The Truth, to the real world. When I did this, sharp words with resentful tones followed, leaving us both frustrated and silent.”
Read moreIt’s Happening to Me, Too: Reflections on Interconnectedness, Interdependence, and Independence in Caregiving Relationships by Leena Ambady
“Every thought begins with I. This is happening to him, I try to say,
not happening to me. But it is, too. This is my place to tell it.”
The above is an excerpt from Kristin Camitta Zimet’s “A Dialysis Diary,” (Intima, Fall 2023). In this beautiful essay, Camitta Zimet writes about her husband’s end-stage kidney disease, the initiation of dialysis, and the impact that his chronic condition and the treatment it required had both on her and her relationship.
Read moreCaring and the Challenges of Social Convention, by Jeffrey Millstein, MD
An internist reflects on his short story as well as a fellow physician’s personal essay and explores the complex issue of crossing implicit social boundaries in the clinician-patient relationship.
Read moreWe’re Invisible, Too: Showing Respect for Healthcare Workers by Cheryl Bailey
A retired gynecologic oncologist reflects on her own career and realizes how watercolor artwork can allow for even healthcare providers to be seen.
Read moreThe Healing Power of Empathy: Does it Exist? Can it be Acquired?
In this reflection, a retired surgeon examines the research findings of evidence-based medicine to uncover whether empathy, in addition to the principles and practice of narrative medicine, can facilitate deeper healing.
Read moreFear and Compassion: At the Heart of Panic Attacks by Lisa H.D. Napolitan
© How a Heart Grows. Susan Baller-Shepard. Fall 2018 Intima
Fiction and visual art are a natural pairing, one digging deep through words, the other a profound visual exploration. Both genres allow ways to explore the issue of mental health.
Read moreHow to Write About Cancer: How Poetry Can Break the Rules by writer Lynne Byler
Recently, I read Adam Conner’s short story “How to Write about Your Cancer” (Fall 2022 Intima) with amusement and recognition. And if I transform the rules in it to a scorecard, my poem, “Minds Go Where Bodies Can't” ends in the red.
Read moreDementia and Alzheimer’s Disease: When the Outside Looks Different From What’s Happening Inside by Kimberly Mitchell
© The War Outside. From “The Impact of War on Mental Health” series. Claire Lawrence Spring 2022 Intima
One of my most enduring memories of volunteering is of helping with a beauty club for patients with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease. Each week I would be regaled with stories of young women visiting their mothers and planning fun outings with their girlfriends. While I applied makeup and painted fingernails, the smiles and facial expressions were those of young women anticipating a good time.
On the outside these ladies were quite different.
Endurance and Gratitude: A reflection on finding joy in difficult moments by Laura Carmen Arena
Both Karen George’s poem, and my “Triptych:Oncology Fish,” share an expression of admiration for the resplendent inner strength in our loved ones, emanating despite the foreboding shadows of illness, suffering and loss. The emotions floating around our lived spaces as our loved ones endure and battle disease in the face of difficult circumstances move in many directions including grieving, reflecting, hoping, enduring and celebrating, colors that shift and radiate with the heroically hopeful, illuminating presence of gratitude and love.
Read more"Reading" Patients When Illiteracy is What Afflicts Them: A reflection by medical oncologist Jose Bufill
While returning to the U.S. on an international flight not long ago, I sat next to a young African woman. As we approached our destination, she sheepishly passed me her passport and a customs form. Since I was in the aisle seat, I assumed she wanted me to pass it along to the flight attendant, until I realized the form was blank. She was asking me to fill it out.
Read moreWhat Clown Doctors See and Don't See: A Look at Healthy Humor by Phyllis Capello
Phyllis Capello, who is a writer and musician, is a NYFA fellow in fiction I and a winner of an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Her collection “Packs Small Plays Big” is from Bordighera Press, 2018. Cantastoria work (sing/storyteller) has taken her from Ireland-to-Istanbul. She has presented at the International Oral History Conference in Rome, Italy and has been a musician/clown since 1990 with Healthy Humor Red Nose Docs, as well as a member of the poetry/activist trio, The Ferlinghetti Girls. ferlinghettigirls.com In 2023 she was honored with People’s Hall of Fame Award for teaching artistry for her work in New York City schools. Her poem “The Ballad of a Harlem Boy” appears in the Fall 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
For thirty years, my hospital work (I’m a clown ‘doctor’/musician for Healthy Humor) has included meeting and entertaining families in clinic waiting rooms, Pediatric ICUs, triaged Emergency Departments and in out-patient, in-patient rooms. Clown-doctor encounters can, if invited, also extend to physical therapy and treatment rooms, hallways, nurses’ stations and elevators. In ED and in out-patient and in-patient rooms permission comes from the medical and childlife staff first (and pertains to situational or isolation status). After that, the child’s permission (being our ultimate “boss”) to enter is strictly respected. In a hospital environment, we are one thing a child can prevent from entering their room.
Knowing when to present ourselves and when to exit means we are not often present for the trauma of Emergency Medical procedures unless specifically requested by staff. I do not see the immediate medical aftermath of a bullet wound. The hands of professionals as they seek to save a life as in Kirilee West’s drawing of hands entitled: “6:21 P.M.” That is why the piece really speaks to me of the drama and humanity inherent in the moments before a medical clown can be of any use to a patient.
Her drawing resonates with me as my poem, “The Ballad of a Harlem Boy,” was written after a nurse shared her distress about a child’s death. Telling us (we work in pairs) of her direct experience, I could only think of her hands and their expert ministrations during that terrible time and of the depth of her humanity for the mortally-wounded fourteen-year-old and his mother.
We all want our hands to be of use: I, in my small way, making music or writing poems; medical staff whose hands take on the most difficult and tender of roles; the artist’s hands who can capture with a charcoal stick the enormity of what we might see if, after the fact, we can allow our creativity to take a step back and tell a story.
Phyllis Capello, who is a writer and musician, is a NYFA fellow in fiction I and a winner of an Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Her collection “Packs Small Plays Big” is from Bordighera Press, 2018. Cantastoria work (sing/storyteller) has taken her from Ireland-to-Istanbul. She has presented at the International Oral History Conference in Rome, Italy and has been a musician/clown since 1990 with Healthy Humor Red Nose Docs, as well as a member of the poetry/activist trio, The Ferlinghetti Girls. In 2023 she was honored with People’s Hall of Fame Award for teaching artistry for her work in New York City schools. Her poem “The Ballad of a Harlem Boy” appeared in the Fall 2023 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.