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In both the literary world and in the clinical world, metaphors take hold of our relationship to illness and health.
“Giving Up the Fight,” by Rebeca Stanfel (Spring 2023 Intima) is a first-person account of her struggle with sarcoidosis and the metaphors that complicated her ability to deal with it. Well-meaning friends and family assailed her with encouragement that depicted chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost.
Read moreGrief 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 moreThe 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 moreIt 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.
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© 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.
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 moreA retired gynecologic oncologist reflects on her own career and realizes how watercolor artwork can allow for even healthcare providers to be seen.
Read moreWhen I read “All Tuned Up” by Albert Howard Carter III (Spring 2021 Intima), I remembered a pediatric intensive care unit patient from my own 1980’s residency experience. In Carter’s poem, a medical resident presents a case during mortality and morbidity rounds. The resident is moved to tears as he tells the gathered audience about the death of a patient he knew well. A senior doctor “gently” offers context and says, “Maybe he was just tired.”
Mercifully, I’ve muffled memories from some of the deaths during my residency training in the pediatric intensive care unit. But I remember a slight girl of about sixteen with silky, wavy hair, lying in a metal-frame bed parallel to the wall against the window, in silhouette.
Read moreIn 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 moreRecalling the loss of her husband, Mike, Dianne Avey’s essay“Morning Light” (Spring 2023 Intima) reaches back a decade to a quiet September morning on Anderson Island in Washington. Avey, a writer and nurse practitioner, draws us, however, not to the moment of her husband’s death but to a “place of quiet morning light.” This liminal stasis exceeds cure and speech and, in my view, renders the “human” (as defined by technical and linguistic competencies) indeterminate. Yet, beyond our abilities to fix and to say, there remains “the only thing we can ever do”: being present and bearing witness.
Read moreA nurse examines a clinical encounter through her poetry and appreciates the individual nature of care.
Read moreA writer and poet honors the memory of her mother by finding the parallels between her own work and the story of another mother and daughter.
Read more“A medically assisted death, such as I recount in my essay “Mercies, Or, the Mostly True Tale of a Narratively Assisted Death” (Intima Spring 2023), is the antithesis of a traumatic ending in an ER. It is highly anticipated, fully orchestrated and well rehearsed – on everyone’s part but my own.”
Read moreA nurse ponders the role of hope in the clinical encounter and whether the holy can be found within the realm of medicine.
Read moreA medical student reflects on the loss of their father to a devastating neurodegenerative disease as well as the power that music can hold during the illness experience.
Read moreA writer reflects on her own mother’s experience with death and dying and argues for the greater recognition of palliative care in the clinical encounter.
Read moreIn reading Liana Meffert’s “Death is Usually an Easy Diagnosis,” I was intrigued by her reflections on the learning and limitation of choreographed roles and scripted dialogue in pronouncing death and informing bereaved families.
Read moreA retired physician reflects on his glimpses into religion and spirituality while confronting his patients’ illness and suffering—as well as his own.
Read moreA medical student examines two poems published in this journal in order to advocate for genuine connection in medical practice between patients and physicians.
Read moreA testimony and tribute to one writer’s mother who passed away from COVID-19.
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