I have spent my career as a nurse working with adult cancer patients. I, too, have experience with the self-protective tool of ‘numbing.’ Last spring, the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City at full force, and I was temporarily transferred to an inpatient, COVID-19-positive cancer unit. I saw no one aside from co-workers, patients, and other essential workers.
Read moreSpeaking Truth: The Visual Arts Help Clinical Diagnosis by Virali Shah
As a society, we are driven by visuals. Advertisements. Social media. Logos. Paintings. Pictures. It is a 21st century skill to be “visually literate.” Only recently, however, the role of visual literacy has expanded into modern medical training.
Read more"Who is Black excellence for exactly?" A poem reflects on that question by medical student Michael Arnold
Michael Arnold is a medical student at Ohio State University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. His poem “Chronic Black Excellence” appeared in the Fall 2019 Intima.
Chronic Black Excellence by Michael Arnold
A hundred years ago, Abraham Flexner
Eulogized Black medicine.
The ink in his pen tattooed
A sleeve on the arm of systemic racism.
The idea that screamed off his report
And echoed the loudest throughout history
Was the notion that Black medicine
Was fundamentally inadequate.
For the last century, Black medicine
Has been self-medicating with Black excellence.
A treatment plan that may be just as bad
As the prevailing social illness.
Black excellence is a poisoned apple,
Being eaten by a Trojan Horse.
Side effects may include:
Elitist attitudes, reactionary logic
Burnout, brunch addiction
And respectability politics
The siren song of Black excellence
Has veered us completely off course.
It’s a self-appointed pedestal that
Makes us look down on the
People that we dreamed of healing.
It makes us want to walk away
From the neighborhoods that
Raised us and never look back.
Black excellence is a blade on
The tongue of Horatio Alger’s descendants;
White people who will cut and paste
Your story into anecdotal evidence
That absolves them of their privilege.
Black excellence is a weight that actively
Compresses our humanity,
Erasing the mere possibility
Of us being normal, regular or average.
It erases the relief of mediocrity
That many of our white colleagues
Comfortably enjoy during their careers.
Who is Black excellence for exactly?
What’s the message we are trying to send?
Who are we sending it to?
Are we trying to claim that we are better
Than the Black people who lifted us up
High enough to access the white-dominated
Space called Western medicine?
Are we trying to signal that we
Are one of the “good ones”?
Is it an attempt to exorcise the demons
Of ever-haunting stereotypes?
Or is it just our insecurities
Crying out, wanting desperately
For white people to finally believe
That we are adequate?
Michael Arnold is a medical student at Ohio State University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. His poem “Chronic Black Excellence” appeared in the Fall 2019 Intima.
On Trauma, Hope and Dragonslayers, an essay by hospital-based physical therapist Galen Schram
Can what we know about PTSD in frontline workers who treated the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings help us understand how to care for our COVID-19 frontline workers? What will be done to understand and treat race-based traumatic stress, a term I hadn’t heard until this summer?
Read moreThe Practice of Prolonging Death, a reflection by palliative care physician Chris Schifeling
“Would we rather die too soon or too late?”
The taboo of talking about death combined with a faith in the insomnia of medical technology leads many to err far on the side of dying too late.
Read moreWho Draws First? A reflection about racial stereotyping by Dr. Ibrahim Sablaban
So, who draws first? Figuratively speaking. In America, someone’s going to draw. Someone’s going to attack and define you by some arbitrary standard. And that someone could be anyone.
Read moreOn (Un)Knowing: A Reflection on the Imagination and the Body by poet Michelle Dyer
©What Lies Beneath by Sapana Adhikari Spring 2020 Intima A Journal of Narrative Medicine
As I lay on the table while the doctor poked and prodded inside my breast, clipping the lump inside me like flower stems, I imagined what the thing might look–what, exactly, lay beneath, and if it had a name.
Read moreMy COVID Hero: How Art Helped Me Reflect on a Global Pandemic by Dr. Brandon Mogrovejo
One late evening, just two months into my intern year in Pediatrics and seven months into a forever changed New York City, I sat down and drew. I drew from a place of anxiety, working the equivalent of two full-time jobs in a hospital during a time when the people I care for, my loved ones and my patients, were under great strain.
Read moreGlobal Citizenship: The Complex Emotions of ‘Going Home’ to a Place You’ve Never Been by Violet Kieu
Going to Vietnam was a formative time of my life–and also a reminder I am not entirely of that place. I am distance, and culture and language apart. Doing a medical elective in Saigon was a paradox: both familiar and foreign.
Read more“A Line Blurring Joy and Grief”: Empathizing from a Distance, by Daniel Ginsburg
How do clinicians carry on their vital work without bearing the grief of patients and their families, yet still comfort them?
Read moreCaught between Floating and Drowning, a reflection about poetry, memory and adapting to chaos by Mikayla Brockmeyer
A state of flux. The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a state of “How will I react to _____?” Listlessness and emotional exhaustion bring about feelings of isolation and longing to be somewhere we are not. Yet, in learning to modify behaviors, collaborations have emerged.
In the opening couplet to Sheila Kelly’s poem entitled “Breathe” (Fall 2017 Intima). she sets the stage and introduces a poignant metaphor, depicting calmness, yet incertitude.
You are floating in the swimming pool again.
Your childhood best friend rises like prayer.
“Breathe” was penned well before the current pandemic, yet the feelings of serenity and safety one day, and panic the next, expressed are relevant today. Using a second-person narrative, she paints a vivid picture of a disjointed home life, sifting through old, painful memories. In the poem, the main character is catapulting between chaos and “floating in the swimming pool.” At the end, I interpret a sense of adaptation from the character that leaves a residue of hope.
In my essay “Turbulent Undertow” (Fall 2020 Intima), parallel feelings are grappled with, as I describe a surfing attempt, and later, my experience as a hospitalist scribe. Woven together, I write about two near-drowning experiences: on surfing and on caring for patients with COVID-19. The best friend in Sheila Kelly’s poem encourages the main character to put on her old swimsuit when distressed. After a long series of days working with the hospitalist, I, too, wanted to offer solace. But instead, all I could offer was “Glad you’re okay,” a phrase that has reverberated through my brain ever since I first heard it myself.
Riding metaphorical surfboards together and finding ways to float in metaphorical swimming pools may not be the best solution to curb the emotional toll of the pandemic. However, validation and shared human connection serve as two ways to avoid possible drowning amidst the pandemic waves.
Mikayla Brockmeyer
Mikayla Brockmeyer is a first year osteopathic medical student at Des Moines University in Des Moines, Iowa. She began working as a hospitalist scribe in 2018, while she was enrolled in the Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences program at Des Moines University. She successfully defended her thesis in 2019 and spent her gap year scribing full time. This is her first time showcasing her storytelling abilities in a public arena. Her non-fiction essay “Turbulent Undertow” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
‘Differential Diagnosis’ Can Be A Lifesaver, a Reflection by Colleen Corcoran
© Differential Diagnosis by Yan Emily Yuan Spring 2020 Intima A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Accurate differential diagnosis can save a life. By being able to determine clearly how one outlying factor or the combination of a group of signs and symptoms tips the scale to the correct pattern confirmation and treatment, our lives can be shaped, saved and lost in this qualifying lens of time. It’s integral to the practice of medicine, but also in many ways to how we make decisions in life. A positive or negative result, a clustering of symptoms, the ticked boxes and specimen samples that can reveal so much as to how we define our experiences of life and are able to move forward.
Read moreAttunement: Reflecting on the Art of Making a Difference by Catherine Klatzker
Empathy and compassion arise from sensitizing events, often many. Sometimes it’s easier than others to track those events to their origins. Patient Jane provided student-doctor Brian Sou with one such activating event. (Field Notes “A Student’s Moment in NYC’s Most Famous Hospital”) In their first encounter, Sou writes “I did not manage to comfort Jane in her moment of vulnerability, when she needed someone to do so the most. I was so interested in the medical aspect of curing that I completely neglected the compassionate side of healing.”
Read moreLosing Touch: How COVID-19 Has Interfered With the Way We Bond by Adam Lalley, MD
The intimacy of touch is deeply rooted in vulnerability, and COVID-19 is reminding us that this vulnerability is biological as well as emotional. For Dr. Vlasic, touch was an act of trust, but nowadays trust seems best measured by how far apart we stand and how carefully we obscure the lower half of our faces.
Read moreAging and Memory from Two Poetic Perspectives: A Reflection by Larry Oakner
As I age into my late sixties, I’m experiencing the blips of short-term memory loss that are common for many people my age. I find the experience a little frightening and disconcerting because I have always had great recall throughout my life, with deep detail and clarity of memories, right down to the emotions at the time.
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