Clara Baselga-Garriga is a second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School.
I lost my father, and the man whose vocation for medicine had ignited my own, two weeks after getting accepted into medical school to an extremely rare and rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is a disease as cruelly complicated to understand—biologically and emotionally—as it is to pronounce.
In less three months, I watched my father deteriorate in ways that are hard to express. Yet, there’s a moment that pierces through the grey of those months. One afternoon, my father was sitting on his wheelchair in the living room. We decided to play some music. When the sound of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” reached him, he smiled and started making circles in the air with a gusto we hadn’t seen in weeks.
Sheila Luna, in her essay “A Crippled Piano” (Intima, Spring 2022), also captures how music and true joy can overcome the limits of the body in the face of illness. Luna falls in love with playing the piano before rheumatoid arthritis begins to attack the very hands that enable her to do so. Despite intense pain, which she describes as feeling like her hands contain shattered glass, she comes back to Bach. She plays imperfectly through the pain and her doctor’s request to quit the keys, because, for her, playing a fugue is something transcendental.
In that way, Luna is not unlike my father, or Isabelle. In my essay “Joy Smile” (Intima, Spring 2023), I describe meeting Isabelle, a woman with a brain tumor that causes the right side of her body to become paralyzed. Because of this, Isabelle cannot smile symmetrically upon request; however, when something gives her true joy, such as seeing a picture of her daughter, her smile symmetry restores. This is due to the fact that we have two mechanisms for smiling controlled by two different parts of the brain, and Isabelle’s tumor had only invaded one.
Seeing what illness does to the people we love and have promised to take care of is painful, but watching true joy and love overcome the limits of the body is uniquely powerful. So, here’s to Sinatra and Bach, to pictures of loved ones and bites that bring us back home, to the things that awaken the soul and to those who make our hearts light up when our bodies have gone dull.
Clara Baselga-Garriga is a second-year medical student at Harvard Medical School. Baselga-Garriga obtained her Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2021. Her current interests include neurodegenerative research and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) advocacy.