My son says I’m a pessimist because for me the cup is never half full or empty: the contents have been spilled entirely. Maybe it’s the work I have undertaken over the past year as Poet in Residence for Macmillan Cancer Centre, UCLH. All day I have to be as positive and empathetic as I can for patients who are in various stages of diagnosis and treatment.

I wrote “The Operation” many times. The first draft was probably in Winter 2013, when I was just free writing short ethnographies that would later be crafted and edited into my undergraduate thesis. In the same way, I see “Witness” by Annie Robinson, published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Intima, as an arm of “The Operation.” Superficially, both talk about reproductive and sexual health. But what resonated the most with me is this one line:

In the Spring 2015 Intima piece “On Elevators,” I navigate the spatial experience of a hospital, charting how the diverse anxieties of the exam room, waiting room, break room and boardroom intersect briefly inside the cramped quarters of an elevator. In her piece “Coming out of the Medical Closet” in the Spring 2014 Intima, nursing student Angelica Recierdo similarly characterizes the medical closet as a place to gather not only supplies, but emotional strength to enter a patient’s room.

In the the poem, "Close to the Flowers: Notes from a Tanzanian Orphanage," Woods Nash bears witness to the plight of orphans, mothers and strangers in a faraway place. It is visceral, the plastic-ness of the sack, the dirt, the body. It is painterly. It illuminates. It is very very very sad. It is a small poem fit for a billboard.

 Immediately my eyes fixate on the center bottom of the photo.  The figure is flesh colored and kneels in an anthropomorphic way, so we know it is human. But the truly remarkable thing about the photo is the feeling that oozes out of it, or rather, her. I feel for her yet I can barely see her. "Things She Cannot Show You" (Fall 2014 Intima) instantly causes me to contemplate language and the great limits it places on conveying an illness narrative; and in turn, how this lack of adequate language leads to intense isolation for humans experiencing, quite literally, unspeakable things.

As I ruminated over my experience of learning to play the violin, playing collaboratively, and then using those skills to heal myself and others, I found Erica Fletcher’s “Viola Strings and Other Troubles: Mentoring a Medical Student’s Artistic Endeavors” (Intima Spring 2014) a source of inspiration. Ms. Fletcher reminded me that tuning a violin or a viola string, or engaging in an artistic endeavor generally, can temper the ebb and flow of a journey of recovery through a mental illness.

I was born and raised in a Catholic family. This revealed itself in the landscape of my childhood in subtle ways: stray rosaries in the the silverware drawer, conversations in which saints were talked about like old neighbors (“Have you seen the rake?” “Hmm, have you talked to St. Anthony lately?”), and the occasional mass in my family’s living room, presided over by my Jesuit uncle. As a fledgling Catholic, I was also exposed to a lot of talk about dignity.

In both the fictional "Absolution" and the nonfiction "What We See When We See Each Other" we are reminded of our shared humanity, and of how much we don’t see when we see each other.

The experience of sitting at the bedside of a loved one as s/he comes to the end of life is utterly one-of-a-kind: unique to the people involved and the circumstances of those final days, hours, and seconds. But there are also so many common—if not universal—elements to it as well.

The only thing worse than a little knowledge may be a lot of knowledge. We clinicians rue the arrival of web-based medical “information” and advice which gives patients and their families the feeling they know as much—or more—than their care providers.

One of my most talented, passionate teachers in medical school, a professor of histology, frequently challenged us to “see God in man,” the divine manifest in the smallest cells and in the largest organs. Regardless of how one interprets “God” based upon personal religious or spiritual beliefs, my professor’s charge speaks to the very human need to search for a greater purpose in nature and in our own physical realities.