Jude Okonkwo is a graduate of Harvard College and a medical student at Columbia Medical School.
A few months into medical school, I found myself peeking out from behind my senior resident at a 33-year-old dying of testicular cancer. While the resident carefully examined the patient, I shifted awkwardly around the room, trying to digest the tragedy in front of me. Maturity as a healthcare provider has meant the courage to forge patient-provider connections even in dire situations like this. Both my poem “The Resident and His Dreams” (Intima, Fall 2022) and Brandon Grill’s “A Brother like You” (Intima, Spring 2019) reflect on the need for connection that both patients and providers experience when confronted with illness. In considering both poems, I chose to examine the contours of that emotional need.
In “A Brother Like You,” Gill paints a familiar image: a young patient finds themselves on the way to the hospital after binging alcohol to drown away the torment of their thoughts and hostile home environment. The poet reveals right away that the patient is starved of human connection, remarking that likely “[f]ew others / Let you [the patient] hug them, I presumed.” Even the speaker’s co-workers warn him away from engaging with the patient, retorting that the speaker “shouldn’t let you [the patient] push me [the speaker] / Around” while the patient repeats the comfort such connection brings. In a stunning way, the poet illustrates a truth I’ve discovered in my short experience in the hospital: how much the smallest of human interactions can mean so much to a patient. In the fourth stanza of my own poem, I seek to write into that same emotional space:
maybe it's not so selfish to be heard
let me speak my free mind into you
in a world full of noise
The speaker in my own poem, a medical resident, begs for an opportunity to speak freely without fear of judgement. Like the patient from Gill’s poem, the resident finds the opportunity to communicate fully and freely with another, hard to come by “in a world full of noise.”
One of the earliest lessons I learned in school was the limit to medicine’s ability. Every human person, after all, will succumb one day to pathology. We must remember as practitioners of medicine how the smallest of things can have the grandest impact on a patient’s wellbeing and never let the peculiarities of a patient’s experience fall too far out of focus.
Jude Okonkwo is a graduate of Harvard College and a medical student at Columbia Medical School. He was selected as the 2020 recipient of the Charles Edmund Horman Prize and the 2021 recipient of the Edgar Eager Memorial Fund Prize for his writing. His work has been published in Pleiades, JAMA Poetry and Medicine, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among other journals. He has studied under authors Paul Yoon, ZZ Packer, Claire Messud, Jamaica Kincaid and Laura van den Berg. He is studying under Dr. Owen Lewis, poet and psychiatrist.