Nancy Smith is a retired registered nurse, who moved through many of the venues of hospital nursing, but who worked mostly in an Intensive Care Unit.
I was a bit worried that the poem I wrote “In the 70’s” (Intima, Fall 2022) might have veered close to sentimentality. Sentimentality is unearned emotion. But then I thought—the patients, the medical staff, the nurses and technicians of every stripe, the housekeepers, the visitors, and even random observers witness and experience the immense earning power of emotions in a hospital. Every particle and wave of every flavor of emotion fills all the space in a hospital. There are rooms where it might concentrate like gelatin—or tar. And spaces where it swirls in and out like a breeze. Spaces that can be hidden.
I imagine the actual place where Joshua Atlas’ “The Anatomy Lab” (Intima, Fall 2022) was drawn may have been a place that was difficult to find. There may have been remnants of emotion there, lurking. The lines are drawn with immediacy, thick and thin. A figure in the first drawing stands to the right in the corner, transparent; we can see through the space encased by the lines. I think it is a person, a student or a technician. But it could be something else. The grouping of figures in the second scene: is it a get-together of the souls of the departed? A conversation on the best way to wield the autopsy knife? Or a representation of the bewilderment of all those gathered, a congress of grief for the reality of human suffering and death? What emotions are being carried for these beings? The last picture in the series feels like a repose; I see the being as covered. A tiny bird seems to be perched on the corpse. The line drawing brings a sense of seeing through; perhaps a satori, seeing into the true nature of the being.
Nurses in hospitals know where the warming blankets are, away from common view. Nurses in the cardiovascular services over the years have imagined how the heart works, because that is also away from view. Gathering data from electronic monitors and internal catheters we see into the functioning of the heart in a very bracketed way—its muscles, nerves, conduction system, vascularity, and baroreceptors all share their information with our machines and mindsets.
In the last stanza of “In the 70’s”, the I see you line could reek like a cliché. But it is the only thing I want to do in the moment: see what is really there. And open to the grace that might reveal it.
Nancy Smith is a retired registered nurse, who moved through many of the venues of hospital nursing, but who worked mostly in an Intensive Care Unit. Smith found herself searching for the poetic voice when she, her patients and co-workers were gathered together during times of pressure, something we call stress. Poetic imagining seemed to expand the space for her. Smith and her family live in rural Maryland, where she has designed an acupuncture practice.