Katrina Kostro, MD, graduated from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in Spring 2020, and was selected into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She will begin psychiatry residency training at NYU/Bellevue. Katrina strives to combine yoga, meditation, poetry, and art, into her practice of clinical healing. Katrina’s poem “Family meeting: medical student meets patient’s daughter” appears in the Spring issue of the Intima.
Speech is a crucial element in human connection. Even more so these days, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical touch has become largely forbidden. One can imagine, then, the tremendous loss associated with aphasia – the loss of ability to understand or express speech.
Jennifer Wolkin’s poem, “Aphasia” (Intima Fall 2018), and my poem, “Family meeting: medical student meets patient’s daughter” (Intima Spring 2020), each portray the heart-breaking, mouth-and-brain-aching, loss of speech. Wolkin writes: “your mouth moved/ with the ease of speech” – a person’s facial muscles may perform the familiar dance that looks like speech – “but the waves of words” produce a “meaningless lexicon linked/ together in/ random refrain.” Both speaker and listener are plagued with confusion at this “random refrain.” Beyond confusion, the person robbed of speech may feel sadness, anger, and pain, as with the patient in my poem: “One night she whispered, Fill my throat with tar.” Once a soprano opera star, now only “low-toned barks escape,” this patient declares, “If I can’t sing, sign me a D-N-R./ Would rather suffocate than stare in silence.” Without a voice, or the ability to produce or understand comprehensible speech, a patient may feel fear and despair.
As healthcare providers, we are privileged – and hopefully obligated – to, as Wolkin’s bio describes, “give voice to those who have sometimes literally lost theirs by bearing witness to their pain (and resilience)…” As our world continues in a global pandemic and a quest for social and racial justice, we should continue to strive to elevate the voices of literally and/or figuratively silenced patients, through providing the best healthcare we can, and through the healing practice of narrative medicine.
Katrina Kostro, MD, graduated from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in Spring 2020, and was selected into the Gold Humanism Honor Society. She will begin psychiatry residency training at NYU/Bellevue. She received her BA in art history from Barnard College. Before medical school, she became a certified yoga instructor, and has taught multiple yoga/meditation workshops for students, physicians, patients, and caregivers. Her poems have appeared in BigCityLit, Mezzo Cammin, Reflexions: The Literary &Fine Arts Journal of CUIMC, and she was an award-winner in NEOMED’s 35thWilliam Carlos Williams Poetry Competition. Katrina strives to combine yoga, meditation, poetry, and art, into her practice of clinical healing.
©2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine