Kieran Shamash is a former PICU nurse who now works as a nurse anesthetist in the Los Angeles area.
Lately, when I sit to write or generate ideas, I try to drop into my body, to connect with my physical being. There is something at once grounding and unnerving about the somatic experience that allows me to see myself in my humanness—strengths, weaknesses, and all. In their non-fiction essay “Try to Turn a Cowboy Vegan” (Intima, Spring 2023) Towela King crafts a stirring narrative about an otherwise routine patient and family interaction that is rooted in the body—past and present. King employs vivid sensory descriptions that evoke the embodied experience of the narrator/provider, setting the foundation for a story of a profound moment of unlikely connection. In this essay, the narrator opens the first scene with a description of the smell in the exam room where they meet a patient for the first time: “the hot New Mexico sun—a tinge of alfalfa and the precipitate from a liter of evaporated sweat” and the sight of a “muscular leathery man with a turquoise-bead-trimmed leather vest.” Yet it is the smell that brings the narrator back to their memory of childhood trauma and oppression. The narrator recognizes this sensation in their body and the observation provides a pause in the narrative for both the reader and narrator to begin to understand the layers of experience between the patient and the provider. By allowing this small bit of space and vulnerability, the narrator ultimately paints a wider picture of the humanity of both the caregiver and the person seeking care.
In my essay “The Pre-Op Interview” (Intima, Spring 2023), I use my sensory experience to reflect on a routine patient interaction that ultimately shifted my perception of my work. In that essay, the patient unexpectedly turns her gaze on the provider. The provider is immediately uncomfortable in her body and she pauses. The brief pause allows for a recalibration of sorts, a chance to shift the interaction out of the realm of “expectations”—as King astutely notes throughout their essay—and to instead open it up to a fuller understanding of the patient’s story. King’s essay is a reminder that embodied experience can offer us a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the way our stories, as providers, connect with our patients and their stories.
Kieran Shamash is a former PICU nurse who now works as a nurse anesthetist in the Los Angeles area. Outside of the operating room she can be found in deep conversation with a good friend, writing, dreaming, enjoying nature, traveling and spending time with her beloved husband and two children. IG @inwardtreasure.