“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 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 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 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 moreThe Caregiver’s Invisibility Cloak: A Reflection on Albert Howard Carter’s story “The Cookie Intervention” by Rossana Di Renzo
Rossana Di Renzo, author of the academic paper, "Embraced By Words" (Fall 2019 Intima) with Marilena Vimercati, lives and works in Bologna, Italy. Her interest has always been narrative and applied narrative medicine which she uses in different fields: in training courses for health professionals, in the degree course in Nursing at the University of Bologna and in research.
“Oh, there’s the PT’s car pulling up. Is it 11:00 already? Must be; Laura’s always on time. Actually I would love to go upstairs and have an hour of peace, but I do like her. She’s always so upbeat and just full of energy. Besides, she always sees progress in my husband Tom, seeing him just once a week. I see him 15 hours every day, and his recovery from the stroke is so slow that sometimes I see no progress at all. None. I’m so worn down, I just feel numb.”
This narrative from the story “The Cookie Intervention” by Albert Howard Carter brings to our minds the many women we interviewed for our paper “Embraced by Words” (Fall 2019 Intima). They told us how they looked after and cared for their husbands, sisters, brothers, children, and parents.
When dealing with the theme of disability, as in Carter’s story, people need to reassemble stories of care that mainly take place within the family, because it is often that both the place of private life and the place of care overlap.
Usually there is one person who devotes oneself to a sick person and that person is the caregiver.
Our research shows that in 50 percent of cases care work is carried out by women, who continue to define themselves not as caregivers but as wives, mothers, and partners. They consider their duty of care natural; their lives are designed only in function of the sick person.
The women we met told of their loneliness and fragility and the thousands of obstacles they have to face in everyday life without knowing how long that routine will last.
A wife said “I’m feeling so alone. I have too much to think about. I do everything. I have a huge weight on my shoulders, everything falls on me.”
When the wishes of the caregivers cannot be fulfilled, as we read in Carter’s story (“I want my husband back”), what will help them to accept disability and their work of care and to ask for help?
Positive and powerful energies are needed in addition to personal resources. It is important to be listened to and give voice to the pain in body and in soul. The support throughout the care process, the family and social networks, the community, the closeness and authentic solidarity of others, ensure that there is a process of rewriting, of evolutionary readjustment that allows them to tolerate, manage suffering and allow themselves to be open to hope.
Rossana Di Renzo, author of the academic paper, "Embraced By Words" (Fall 2019 Intima) with Marilena Vimercati, lives and works in Bologna, Italy. Her interest has always been narrative and applied narrative medicine which she uses in different fields: in training courses for health professionals, in the degree course in Nursing at the University of Bologna and in research.
From T. S. Eliot to Alzheimer’s: Similar Themes Within Separate Illnesses by Laura-Anne White
The final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes” has been a favorite of mine since my college English Literature class. My professor had a passion for literature that bordered on fanatical, and all but commanded us to over-analyze “Preludes.” Haunting, perplexing, and illustrative; the words build into a fog of emotion that I have accessed at various intervals since. It feels cataclysmic, desert-like; as if you are observing the experience of another from the sidelines, which consist of nothing but dirt.
Read moreHow Carolyn Welch's poem "Relapse" reflects on America's opioid crisis by Angelica Recierdo
Carolyn Welch’s poem “Relapse” from Intima’s Spring 2018 issue speaks deafening volumes of how addiction can be in every corner of mundane family and home life. Especially in the context of America’s current opioid crisis, her poem does the hard work of showing the pain felt by parents in towns all over the country who have to make painful decisions in the hopes of their child’s recovery.
Read moreHonoring the Messengers of Grief: Thinking deeply about what haunts us by poet and nurse practitioner Katherine Seluja, ARNP
I’m sorry to admit that during my own healthcare training, I was taught to carefully guard my feelings, to remain composed and “professional.” The thought of hugging a patient was considered too personal, too involved. Now, decades into my career, I have most definitely put that advice aside.
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