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 moreFinding 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.
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 moreAre We Still Ourselves? By Marie-Elisabeth Lei Holm
Facing death led Kalanithi to grasp the flow of time in an entirely different way. From being a steady currency–a predictable resource of skill-building and career advancement–it dawned on him that time does not always follow a linear path of progress.
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 moreFinding 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.
Read moreIn 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.”
Read moreAlways 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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