Giving Up Metaphors: A reflection about how we talk about illness by poet physician Ronald Lands

In both the literary world and in the clinical world, metaphors take hold of our relationship to illness and health.

Giving Up the Fight,” by Rebeca Stanfel (Spring 2023 Intima) is a first-person account of her struggle with sarcoidosis and the metaphors that complicated her ability to deal with it. Well-meaning friends and family assailed her with encouragement that depicted chronic illness as a battle to be won or lost.

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Big Moments are Surrounded by Little Moments: An End-of-Year Reflection by doctor Rory O’Sullivan

Big moments are surrounded by little moments. That’s what I was trying to pull out in my story “There’s a Special On Car Washes,” published in the latest issue of Intima. That bewildering sensation, common in life and especially in healthcare, that extraordinary things happen but that time marches on without sentimentality. You win the big game but when you get home you still have to take out the garbage. You receive a life-changing diagnosis and then you have to figure out the machine to get out of the hospital parking lot.

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Learning to be Present for an Act of Dying by UCSF Medical Center professor Krishna Chaganti

It is the great privilege of medicine that we are asked to show up, constantly, albeit in a different role than a family member would be. To not look away is in the fabric of what we do. It is partly why the practice of medicine can be exhausting, electronic charting and reimbursement quibbles aside. We are asked as caregivers not to dispense always but to receive, to hear questions that we don’t want to reflect upon. It is our privilege to be present.

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Listening to Beethoven: A Reflection on Professional Responsibility and Personal Recognition by poet Susan Carlson

“I like Beethoven the best!” is a declaration made by a patient of Mitali Chaudhary, as she readies to leave his hospital room.  A busy senior medical resident at the University of Toronto, Chaudhary juggles many demanding responsibilities with her desire to get to know this elderly patient.  In her Field Notes essay titled “Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5,” published in Intima’s Fall 2023 issue, she recalls how she’d tried to get her patient to respond to questions about symptomatology, all the while aware that twenty-three other patients – along with a group of junior residents and medical students – were awaiting her time and attention.  In that moment, she finds herself turning away from an opportunity for a personal interaction with him in order to ensure she manages her tasks appropriately.  

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The Thing About ‘Good News’ at the Doctor’s Office by neuropsychology postdoc fellow Sarajane Rodgers

In theory, whenever we go to the doctor, most of us want to hear “good news.” The test is negative. You don’t have ___. Your results are inconsistent with ___. There are times where we take that in and walk away with an emotional weight removed. Other times, we are left with a void. The diagnosis we thought we could hang a hat on is taken away. Now where do we put our hat?

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Connecting with the World of Our Patients: A Reflection by Savita Rani

In her poem “Internet Dating for Centenarians(Intima, Fall 2021), Sarah Smith paints an animated picture of her cheeky and cheerful elderly patient. Smith, a board-certified family physician and author of The Doctor Will Be Late, describes her dilemma about which topic to discuss with her patient—lipids or love.

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Lauds: A solitary prayer at the scrub sink by pediatric surgeon Kristen A. Zeller

In the hospital, routines carry us through our days and lend a semblance of structure to the chaos of lives disrupted by illness. Some routines happen on a large scale—weekly gatherings of departments for Grand Rounds, hospital leadership meetings for safety huddles, the hustle of getting a cadre of operating rooms started nearly simultaneously in the predawn. Other routines are more intimate—the sequenced process of doing a sterile central line dressing change, the donning and doffing of PPE outside a patient’s room, the one-one-one nursing handoff at shift change.

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The Shit Poems: A Reflection by Drea Burbank

I am interested in the juxtaposition between my use of poetry to shed traumatic experiences and memories from medicine, and the description of William Carlos Williams by Britta Gustavson (“Re-embodying Medicine: William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Attention,” Spring 2020 Intima).

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How Touch Affects Healing, a reflection by Wendy Tong

In her Field Notes essay “Hand Holding” (Fall 2019 Intima), Dr. Amanda Swain describes the experience of beginning her surgery rotation as a third year medical student. In the early days of the rotation, she feels an intense sense of being out of place within the “intricately choreographed dance” of the operating room. But when the next patient is wheeled in, Dr. Swain is reminded of how a nurse once took her hand before she underwent surgery, the touch conveying an unforgettable message of comfort during a time of deep vulnerability.

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Doctoring and Disobedience: Speaking an Important Truth, a reflection by Kelly Elterman

Sometimes, the truth can be uncomfortable. It can be difficult to hear and often, even more difficult to say. In her Field Notes piece entitled “Doctoring and Disobedience” (Spring 2020 Intima) Dr. Lisa Jacobs recalls her struggle with being told to hide the truth of a prognosis from an elderly patient with metastatic disease. Despite the instruction of her attending physician, and the decision of the patient’s family and ethics team to not speak of death to the patient, Dr. Jacobs feels compelled to let her cognitively-intact patient learn the truth. So strong is her conviction that she takes on considerable risk to her own career for the sake of bringing the truth to her patient.

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Who Draws First? A reflection about racial stereotyping by Dr. Ibrahim Sablaban

So, who draws first? Figuratively speaking. In America, someone’s going to draw. Someone’s going to attack and define you by some arbitrary standard. And that someone could be anyone.

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