Julie Sumner teaches creative writing in Nashville, Tennessee. She has worked as a critical care nurse, liver transplant coordinator, and massage therapist.
White walls, white sheets, white and gray speckled tile floor. The blankness of it all mirrored my mind—wiped clean of all my thoughts and all my plans for the day, the week, the unforeseeable future. A quick slip. A bad break. The bones in my right elbow were now in maybe a half-dozen pieces. There was nothing to do but to sit on the stretcher in the E.R., and avoid looking at or thinking about, much less moving, my swollen right arm.
I remembered a poem with astonishing clarity considering the pain. There was the feeling of bones like a bag of rocks, the feeling of Dilaudid glazing everything with a thin but welcome numbness. I watched the flow of the nurses as they leaned against the nurses’ station, peered into my room, checked the computer for orders.
And then I remembered all of my patients. How many I’d observed struck down by pain and anxiety, how so many were gracious to me even then, bearing the weight of their broken bodies like a rare offering. It was all that they had. I remembered how many of them always said “thank you” no matter their situation. A nurse watching me from outside the door walked in with an emesis basin as I started to heave. “Thank you,” I said.
It’s terribly blurry and indistinct—that notion of who receives the most in a relationship between a patient and their doctor or nurse. In “Love, Frank” (Intima, Fall 2022), Cheryl Bailey illustrates this concept with her account of one woman, an ovarian cancer survivor, whose wit and zest for life transform her clinic visits into much-anticipated events for the surgeon and the nurse caring for her.
Bailey chronicles her patient’s journey not only through cancer and chemotherapy, but also through the eventual placement of a colostomy and the development of chronic iron-deficiency anemia. Through it all, the patient’s determination and sense of humor carry her onward. Watching her patient, Bailey observes, “She… helped me confront my own fear of death. I identified with her, and as I watched this woman beating the odds, I was grateful to have lived those same years in health.” In “Love, Frank,” Bailey perfectly articulates the beautiful surprise of medicine—that the dignity and healing of a patient often overflow to their caregivers, showing them the fullness of life even in their illness.
Julie Sumner teaches creative writing in Nashville, Tennessee. She has worked as a critical care nurse, liver transplant coordinator, and massage therapist. Sumner has published her work previously in Catalpa, The Wondrous Real, Fathom Magazine, The Cresset, and The San Pedro River Review. She has work forthcoming in Relief and Poets Write the Land Anthology. Sumner received her undergraduate degree in English from Birmingham-Southern College, MSN in Adult Acute Care Nursing from Vanderbilt University, and MFA in Poetry from Seattle-Pacific University.