Driving home on the loop, I was struck by a mix of emotions as I both mourned and celebrated the replacement of a breastfeeding billboard for a different public service announcement.
Read moreBefore Diagnosis: The Blissful Unknowing by Susan Ito
Lisa Kerr’s poem, “The Borrowed Car,” resonates deeply. It captures with great poignancy the ordinary moments we experience before we are struck by a sudden diagnosis, or the possibility of one.
Read moreGrowing Thick Skin by Michael Fredrick Geisser
After reading Again by Randy Hale, I felt that we have both gone through the same life-changing medical course: she, breast cancer; me, primary lateral sclerosis that for several years had the potential to morph into ALS.
Read moreThe Paradoxical Role of Paradox by Jeffrey L. Brown, MD
Moral and ethical considerations can greatly increase the complexity of medical decisions. The dilemmas described in Ellen Kolton's essay (“Ethics Consult: To Tell or Not to Tell;” The Intima, Spring 2015) and those that I experienced as a military doctor (“The Moral Matrix of Wartime Medicine;" The Intima, Fall 2015} share a similar frustration – the inability to find “correct” answers for difficult questions.
Read moreWe All Suffer by April Brenneman
In the Intima Fall 2013 edition, Dan Luftig confesses a secret: he wants an anonymous person to have a stroke during his first hospital rotation. In his Field Notes piece: “Paradoxical Wishes,” Luftig
The Body Public by Holly Schechter
When I was twenty-one and not pregnant, a stranger on the subway congratulated me on my pregnancy. It was so presumptuous. Preposterous! A decade later, in my own medical narrative, I again experienced
Needs and Needles by Sara Backer →
There are secrets in our blood we don’t want disturbed; when blood transmutes into information, some part of the magic of human life is lost.
Read moreA Round of Tea by Ellis Avery
I was moved by the beauty of the writing in Susan Ito’s “Rounds” as well as by its subject matter: the centrality
Against Medical Advice: What "Bad" Patients Teach Us by Mari Georgeson →
In “The Quixotic Pursuit of Quality,” by Dean Schillinger, and in my story, “The Identification,” (both Fall 2015 Intima) we have a couple of “bad patients.” They are not doing what their doctors want them to do.
Read moreClearing the Thought Dishes by Priscilla Mainardi
Two pieces in the Spring 2015 issue of the Intima illustrate how fiction and poetry enable a writer to range widely in search of an emotional truth. In Stephanie Reiff’s affecting poem, “Emergency Department,” a woman’s mind fills with images of a miscarriage in the emergency room while she cleans her house. In Kimberly LaForce’s short story, “Emerging into the Light,” the nurse recording and assisting with an autopsy imagines the life and death of the dead man. These works show different ways caregivers cope with death.
Read moreA Closer Read of Doug Hester’s poem "Speed Dating by Type" by Kimberly LaForce
I was immediately drawn to Doug Hester’s poem "Speed Dating by Type." As a registered nurse, the jargon is one I can easily understand and upon a first read, the familiarity of language made me stop and look again.
Read moreWhen Timing is Everything: Knowing When A Story Should Be Told by Richard Sidlow →
My essay "Christmas Day" was written almost twenty years after the incident it describes. Besides the common excuse of being too busy, one of the many reasons for the delay in writing it was the sadness that permeates it. I would periodically visit my notes describing that day and tears would well up in my eyes every time. I knew this story had to be told—the question was when would I be able to.
Read moreA Global Inequality in Kindness by M. Sophia Newman
“'Wanna Play Doctor?'” Lauren Kascak’s article in Intima Spring 2014, describes the same country (Ghana) and same province (Central Region) as the one in “The Death of the Old Farmer” (Intima Fall 2014). My article chronicles the final day of a man who lived near a rural hospital where I completed observations in 2007. Hers describes a student trip to a different rural town, where she completed training in gynecological techniques.
Read moreDarkness is Human: Let It Help You, the Doctor, See the Other by Karen Jahn
From the opening of her essay, "Heart Failure," Rachel Conrad reveals the dark space of her psyche. Her generalization about patients’ “overload,” the symptoms of their various diseases, is her particular failure of heart. This inability to empathize with the other threatens her career.
Read moreIt’s Funny: Lining the path of illness with humor by Sean J. Mahoney
It’s funny. I visited the Intima website to initiate a dialogue with an existing piece in the archives that, metaphorically, had been chatting (unbeknownst to me) somewhat telepathically with my poem "Dude, the Stage?”(Intima Fall 2014). Furthermore, the writer Keenan Whitesides ("The Choice," Field Notes, Spring 2014 Intima) had similar telepathy occurring concurrently. She too reacted to something in Aimee Burke Valeras’s “The Appearance of Choice” (Fiction, Spring 2012 Intima) in writing her piece.
Read moreDoctors are clueless. So are patients. By Marcia Butler
Clinical Flashback (Fall 2014 Intima) by Osman Bhatty, sharply and beautifully reveals how one woman’s rapid and bewildering decline into terminal illness became a seminal teaching moment for the young medical student. Beyond the person lying in a hospital bed was a life story that he could not possibly glean in the 10 minutes he expected to be there, just to draw blood from her gnarled hands. But Bhatty drew back, startled. He recognized what every doctor must: there is a history behind those old and wrinkled hands.
Read moreThe “Yes, And” Approach: Speaking the Language of Illness by Samantha Greenberg →
Caring for my grandmother was incredibly frustrating. There were many things I wanted—and felt as though I needed—to communicate with. I most often wanted to talk to morphine. I wanted to understand how, pulsing through her body, the morphine could send my grandmother back to places and times I did not know.
Read moreOn Knowing What To Do with the Dying by Sara Baker →
Most of us are not prepared for our role—medical or otherwise—with a person who is dying. We are not around death often, and we feel awkward and unsure of ourselves when confronted with it. In my poem, “What Do the Dying Want?” I give voice to this dilemma—do the dying want words or silence or music? Do they want to be touched or “to be left alone, to slip modestly/from their bodies when no one is looking, to leave without a fuss?”
Read moreOnce Upon a Time, Uncensored: Diagnosis, or the Moment of Disclosure by Kathryn A. Cantrell →
Most illness narratives lack a definite beginning or end; instead, they are conglomerations of family stories, heuristics, and societal images from long before a disease presents. Despite knowing this, I always return to that first moment of disclosure as the once upon a time conception of an illness narrative.
Read moreThe Art of Translation: Finding the Right Words About Cancer by Sarah Safford
When I first was asked to comment on the connection of my work to another one in this journal I didn’t know where to begin. How to choose? All of the pieces spoke to me in some way and I was so happy to have found a community of like-minded souls, searching for meaning and beauty in stories of illness. Then I came across “Translate” by Mario de la Cruz and realized how deeply the heart of my work connects to his spoken words, as I too am looking for “…the power to translate/from my lips to your ears/from my thoughts to your thoughts/my interior to your exterior…” using language to shed light in dark places.
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