It was in those gaps, between our lived experience—the crushing uncertainty about how long my husband would live, the daily reality of his intolerable pain, and the abrupt shift from a life of joyful ease to one spent contemplating death—and the oncology profession’s standards of care, first-line treatments, and numeric pain scales that my frustration festered.
Read moreGrowth is Not Linear: A Reflection on Recovery and Healing by Sujal Manohar
I skimmed through “Eight Months after a Suicide Attempt” (Spring 2015 Intima) once as I perused articles in past issues of Intima. But I came back to it, read it again, and again. Andrea Rosenhaft’s non-fictional and personal narrative speaks to the nonlinear recovery process after mental illness. It is also a deeply vulnerable account of the realities of suicidal depression.
Read moreBecoming the Superheroes Our Parents Need: The Journey from Child to Worthy Caretaker by Usman Hameedi
Our parents are often our first examples of superheroes. They make gourmet meals from minimum wage, give hugs that vanquish our demons, and provide limitless love. They are impervious to damage or decay and are always ready to save our days. So, seeing the human in them, the mortality in their breath is unsettling. When they come to need us, we feel so grossly unprepared.
Read moreCaring for Our Caregivers: A short reflection by poet and hematology-oncology nurse Nina Solis
Caregivers deserve patience, gratitude and comfort just as much as those they support. As healthcare providers, we all could use a reminder to advocate for these irreplaceable members of a patient’s team.
Read morePoetry Helps Healing: Writing Poems on the Road to Recovery by Ellen Goldsmith
“Anatomy in Nature” is a gift that encourages appreciating the beauty and miracle of our bodies and the correspondence between forms in nature and what’s inside us—our heart, our lungs, our brain, our spine. What keeps us alive.
Anatomy Lesson: See the Face of Those Before You by Rodolfo Villarreal-Calderon, MD
For those with the privilege of having participated in a longitudinal cadaver dissection, the connection you build with the donor’s body is known to be a truly unique experience. That bond is part of what I attempted to capture in my poem “Through Damp Muslin.” Especially reflecting on how to express gratitude to the person who once was—and now who is, or at least whose body is—lying before you.
Lady Psychiatrist Queen: Compassion in Caregiving, a reflection by Eileen Vorbach Collins
Lisa Jacobs, in her nonfiction piece, March Manic (Intima Spring 2019) describes a long shift on a psychiatric unit. She is “beyond exhausted” to the point of having questioned her own grasp on reality.
As a case manager in a Baltimore City hospital, I once spent hours attempting to find placement for a homeless 19-year-old addicted to heroin who needed long term IV antibiotics. When I asked if I might call her mother she replied “I don’t give a fuck” but retracted her permission as I was leaving the room. I pretended not to hear. The next day I was told she had signed out AMA (Against Medical Advice). a colleague said, “Get over it. She was a waste of time and resources.”
Read moreWhat Does ‘Paying Attention’ Mean in a Healthcare Setting? A Reflection by Ewan Bowlby
Ewan Bowlby is a doctoral student at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) in St Andrews. He is researching ways of using mass-media artworks to design new arts-based interventions providing emotional, psychological and spiritual care for cancer patients. Bowlby’s paper “Talk to me like I was a person you loved”: Including Patients’ Perspectives in Cinemeducation” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
Narrative Medicine is about creating connections: finding words, ideas or stories that bridge the gap between patients and health professionals. This search for common ground is beautifully rendered in Carol Scott-Conner’s short story “Christmas Rose” (Spring 2017 Intima). Her fictional narrative reveals how mutual understanding can emerge in unexpected places. An encounter between the resolute, inscrutable Mrs. Helversen and her oncologist shows that the relationship between a physician and patient can flourish when the physician pays attention to the intimate, personal details of a patient’s story.
Initially, the clinical encounter in “Christmas Rose” seems unpromising, hampered by reticence and disagreement. Mrs. Helversen, who has a neglected tumor on her breast, has been “strong-armed” into a cancer clinic by her concerned daughter, and she is not receptive to the prospect of treatment. Scott-Conner, a Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, switches the first-person narrative from Mrs. Helversen to her oncologist, allowing the reader to inhabit two alternative perspectives on the same meeting and reminding us that the same interaction can be interpreted very differently.
When I wrote an academic article that appears in the Spring 2021 Intima proposing that patients’ perspectives should be included in “cinemeducation,” these differences in interpretation were central to my argument. Showing clips from films to encourage medical students to relate to a fictional patient is an excellent idea. Yet listening to how patients respond to these clips can enrich this pedagogical method. As I demonstrate through the qualitative research presented in my article, patients “see things differently.” The same fictional scene featuring a patient-doctor interaction can draw responses from patients that surprise and challenge healthcare professionals. So, why not use such scenes as a space in which different perspectives can be expressed and discussed, bringing patients and providers together through the audio-visual medium?
In “Christmas Rose,” it is a rock that facilitates this meeting of minds. While the oncologist is surprised when Mrs. Helversen describes her tumor as a “rose,” betraying a complex emotional attachment to the growth, she finds a way to react empathetically and imaginatively to Mrs. Helversen’s unusual behavior. Offering the elderly patient a desert rose rock in exchange for her tumorous “rose,” the oncologist persuades Mrs. Helversen to accept treatment. This fictional oncologist shows an adaptability and ingenuity that the health professionals involved in my research also exhibited. In my article, I describe how health professionals engaged constructively with patient’s unique or unexpected responses to imagined patient-doctor interactions in films. Listening to both sides and hearing alternative perspectives on the same encounter can yield important, enlightening insights, whether one is participating in a focus group, watching film clips or doing a close reading of a short story such as “Christmas Rose.”
Ewan Bowlby is a doctoral student at the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) in St Andrews. He is researching ways of using mass-media artworks to design new arts-based interventions providing emotional, psychological and spiritual care for cancer patients. This involves using fictional narratives, characters, and imagery to reflect and reframe patients' experiences of living with cancer, helping them to understand and articulate the effect of cancer on their lives. He is developing the impact of his research through an ongoing collaboration with Maggie Jencks Cancer Care Trust (Maggie's) and Northumberland Cancer Support Group (NCSG). Other interests include theological engagement with popular culture, the relationship between theology and humor and the use of narrative form for theological expression. Bowlby’s paper “Talk to me like I was a person you loved”: Including Patients’ Perspectives in Cinemeducation” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
Warmth, Body and Longing by Sonya Huber
While writing my essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System, I began to explore a relationship with my body that was not constrained to the pain of rheumatoid arthritis. I began to lean into examples provided by such beautiful works as Anatole Broyard’s book Intoxicated By My Illness.
Read moreThresholds and Transgressions, a reflection on ICU chaos, communitas, liminality and Levinas by Nancy Smith
Nancy Smith is a retired Registered Nurse. Though she moved through the many domains of hospital nursing, most of her work took place in an Intensive Care Unit. Her co-workers noticed that she would place small strips of paper with poems by various authors on her locker from time to time along with the pictures of her family.
Read moreOn 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 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 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.
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 moreBeing a Patient: Coping with the Loss of Control and Privacy in a Hospital by Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
Patients often feel unexpectedly confined in the hospital.
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