Albert Howard Carter, III, is faculty affiliate, Trent Center, Duke University. He has worked in the literature and medicine/health area for over 30 years. His short story “The Cookie Intervention” appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
I’m thinking of a triangle here, the home visit by a PT described in my story “The Cookie Intervention” (Fall 2019 Intima), Tim Cunningham’s “A Good Night Out” (Spring 2014 Intima), and my experience as a pastoral-care visitor and a massage therapist in hospitals. Cunningham, an ER nurse, describes and critiques a hospital system that is understaffed, overworked, and reduced to giving mechanical, reductionist care for a population that is part of the American tragedy of the opioid epidemic.
In this setting, there is no social worker, no chaplain, nor any pastoral-care volunteers with time to listen and to provide solace, comfort, and support to patients–and, secondarily, to medical staff. The patients are like cars driven in to a garage; they meet mechanics who cannot discuss feelings, meanings, pain, or the deep causes of the current dilemmas. Cunningham feels these deficits, but has no time (nor job requirement) to address them.
My short story “The Cookie Intervention” shows a physical therapist on a home visit to a stroke survivor for aftercare. Personable, sociable, and caring, she uses resources of the patient, family members, and even the kitchen. She creates an imaginative treatment that engages the patient’s emotions and motivation. He is not treated as a standard case, a material problem to be solved, but as a full-spectrum human with prospects.
When I trained for pastoral care, we learned that listening, conversation, and gentle touch—on the arm or shoulder—were all powerful ways to create a social bond and reduce patient stress. When I was a hospital massage therapist, nurses in the infusion clinic would ask me to work with a new patient or one with high blood pressure. As I massaged their hands or feet, we chatted, and I watched shoulders relax and numbers on the blood pressure monitor go down. In earlier eras, nurses provided massage—even earlier, physicians also—but with industry-style healthcare, it has disappeared as a norm.
My latest book In Peril: All People, All Life, Our Earth; In Prospect: Better Healthcare and Medicine: Exploring Massage, Cancer, Qigong, & Climate Change (San Francisco: U of California Medical Humanities Press, 2019) discusses widening the medical gave through integrative medicine and health humanities as well as patient- and family-centered care. A wider view includes persons’ full humanity and enlists their assets for maintaining and improving their health, even when they are injured or sick, even when near death.
Albert Howard Carter, III, is faculty affiliate, Trent Center, Duke University. He has worked in the literature and medicine/health area for over 30 years. Carter, who taught literature at Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla., for many years, has been a pastoral care volunteer in an ER/Trauma Center also a licensed massage therapist and certified Qigong healer working with cancer patients. He and his wife now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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