“Of Prematurity and Parental Leave” (Intima, Fall 2021) describes the harrowing experience of giving birth to a premature baby during residency. It’s written by doctors married to each other —Dr. Campagnaro and Dr. Woodside—who co-construct a narrative by telling it from their own perspective.
I enjoyed this piece because it took a microscope to the side of medicine that idealistic medical students like myself prefer not to see. In medical school we learn about pathologies in an abstract way, as if “that” disease could not happen to me or my family or “that” condition only happens to “those” types of people. But Dr. Campagnaro and Dr. Woodside’s forthcoming account reminded me of an uncomfortable truth: that we and our loved ones are just as likely to fall victim to disease as anyone, and when we do, we too find ourselves scared, stressed and struggling to manage responsibilities.
In fact, after reading this piece, I began to wonder whether proximity to medicine, and an understanding of what could go wrong, is actually an undesirable thing when watching a loved one battle disease. In my piece “Learning to Walk” (Intima, Fall 2021), I describe how overbearing I was caring for the animals at my family’s ranch in California. I described watching the birth of puppies and a donkey, and being consumed with thoughts of hemorrhage, stillbirths, and inadequate colostrum intake, having just learned about these pathologies in class. And while these events were very trivial compared to what Dr. Campagnaro and Dr. Woodside went through, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they too felt their medical knowledge and experience, far more than mine, was a curse rather than a blessing.
For example, Dr. Woodside noted he had rotated in the very pediatric surgery unit his son was in and had “specific fears that [wouldn’t] go away,” while Dr. Campagnaro contrasted her son’s “miniscule” tidal volumes with those of her adult patients. During this time, were they able to divorce themselves from all that they had seen—from the tragedies and heartbreak of medicine, and from the times that medicine failed?
Regardless of how they might answer this question, I am grateful to both of them for this piece. It portrayed the challenges of starting a family during residency and forced me to reflect on how I might handle such a situation in the future. To view our field from this perspective, I believe, is the purpose of narrative medicine.
Mason Vierra is a medical student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. Vierra grew up in Monterey, CA, where at a young age he developed a passion for writing and the humanities; he received his bachelor’s in science from Vanderbilt University, after which he worked in the finance sector in Boston, lived and volunteered in Peru and did postbaccalaureate premedical studies in Baltimore. While he has not yet chosen a specialty, Vierra is interested in surgery and community health, and he hopes to make narrative medicine and journalism an integral part of his career. He resides in Chicago, Illinois.