In her essay “The Shape of the Shore” (Spring 2020 Intima), Rana Awdish takes us into the intensive care unit during the ravages of a pandemic. She shows us “…the desperate thrashing patients on the other side of the glass” and “…the sticky blood on the floor.” As I read the words, my breath becomes shallow as fear and grief pummel into me. Somewhere deep, beneath the shrouds of consciousness, the words resonate, and I feel as though I am slipping beneath an indigo sea.
In the weeks after reading it, I keep coming back to her essay and I wonder why her words resonate so deeply. As a neonatologist my experiences are vastly different from those of my adult ICU colleagues. But as I re-read the piece, parallels emerge—the sight of a patient struggling to breathe against the cadence of the ventilator, the sense of hopelessness as a patient dies, or my own fear as I don PPE and pray the virus doesn’t slip in through a momentary break in the seal between my mask and skin.
My Field Notes essay “This Is Not A New Story” tells the story of a late preterm baby girl, born to a mother suffering from drug addiction. Within days the baby’s muscles become tight and her cry high-pitched as she lurched into withdrawal. As I talk with her mother, I feel helpless to change the trajectory of it all—the fact that her baby will go to another family and the certain likelihood this mother will die soon, of an overdose or endocarditis or trauma. Like the healthcare workers in Awdish’s piece, I wrestle with feelings of guilt, grief and helplessness. I see myself in them and them in me.
But Awdish tells us there is hope in community: “Of all the tools we were offered there, it was time and space and each other that allowed us to reconstitute ourselves. In the circle, we saw that the actions we had characterized as inhuman were understandable, even necessary, when set down between us. We saw the sincere intentions of our colleagues. We saw that they were full of goodness, and thought it was possible that we were too.”
I believe narrative can bind us in community, so we are never alone. Narrative can help us realize we all inhabit the same shore, as we look collectively at an indigo sea.
Benjamin Rattray is a newborn critical care physician in North Carolina where he serves as Associate Medical Director of Neonatal Intensive Care at the Cone Health Women’s and Children’s Center. He completed a pediatric residency and a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellowship at Duke University Medical Center, holds an MBA from LSU Shreveport, and is a Certified Physician Executive. He is the author of When All Becomes New: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Love, and Loss. Learn more at benjaminrattray.com.