Joanne Wilkinson
Joanne Wilkinson is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University, a voracious reader and a single parent who writes whenever she gets the chance. Her Field Notes essay “Invisible” appears in the Fall 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
For many physicians, a clinical day is a river of tasks to be navigated, brief encounters with patients and longer encounters with insurance companies and other providers and the bureaucratic tide of work that threatens to sweep us away. Sometimes it can be hard to pause amidst the clamor to experience a moment with a patient and let it sink into our consciousness.
“Hurried,” anesthesiologist Molly McCormick’s Field Notes essay from the Spring 2024 Intima, highlights one of these moments—a brief exchange with a patient undergoing a facial reconstruction so that he “won’t look like a monster” at his daughter’s wedding. The narrator tells him that his daughter may be more happy that he is present than critical of his appearance. The patient’s tears of gratitude haunt the physician as she “move[s] back into the rush of [her] day, that face, those tears staying with [her].”
These moments come to us randomly, often without any advance warning. The moment I describe in “Invisible,” repositioning a stuffed bunny at the bedside of a dying patient with end-stage dementia, is another one of these. We recognize the humanity of another; it touches something within us, and somehow we know it will stay with us even as we speed up in the hallway on our way to the next task.
When I look back on my career at its end, I often think that it will be these moments—these small smooth stones emerging from the river of hurry and worry each day—that I remember and prize. I will remember the stones, and not the river itself.