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?

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Finding What's Essential in Just Laundry: Painting and Poetry in Dialogue By Alexis Rehrmann

In both the painting and the poem, these particulars are gone but the objects remain and hold an impression of that past life. There’s honor in caring for these objects, in both our daily work and our creative lives.

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My 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.

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Caught 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

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.




Finding Our Way Home: A Reflection on New Year's Day 2021 by Priscilla Mainardi

In these troubled times of sickness and loss, of protest and division, it’s uplifting to read about positive actions, such as those I took for a dying friend, which I describe in my piece “To Melinda” (Fall 2020 Intima). Two other works in the Fall 2020 Intima also describe small positive acts that make a difference in people’s lives. Reading them eases our sense of helplessness by offering us hope.

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In This Time of Corona: Many Stories, Many Lives, a reflection by surgeon Daly Walker

Sapana Adhkari’s “Covid’s Agony,” an evocative and gruesome depiction of the sagittal section of a human head screaming in agony, represents, in a single image, the anguish seen in the corona-captured characters of my short story, “Resuscitation.”

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Always Tell The Truth, Except When It’s Maladaptive by Douglas Krohn

In the most neurotic days of the pandemic, I return home from my contaminated workplace, and sincerely offer my wife solace . . . in the form of a big fat lie. On another day, I confide in her the loss of a colleague . . . and wound her with the facts.

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