When I first read this essay, I looked up at my picture of Frida. Why is she really she in my office? What do I want her to invite people to feel? The truth is: I’ve been in pieces before. 

Every person has a story, and every story is different.

Memories aren’t always pretty, a fact that Jenny Qi’s poem, “Writing Elegies Like Robert Hass,” directly addresses.  

If simply living life revises what we know to be real, neither I, nor anyone else can ever recapture what in fact we experienced. All that remains of our past are our emotionally true memories, colored by our current state of mind. 

A piece, music and piece, part of body, maybe not really bone or marrow but not the whole, and doesn't piece sound like peace? Peace in the valley, maybe, or the grave and we are back to my piece. Tense is like a violin string, taut, or is it "taught me to love the Brahms D Major"? 

A strong attribute of narrative medicine is to find common ground, the universal that shines through in the particulars of each individual experience of illness and the healing journey. I appreciate the opportunity to compare and contrast a companion poem in Intima with my own.

Dixon Yang’s non-fiction “The Bright Speck,” published in the Spring 2016 issue of Intima, struck me as a bright contrast to my short story based on my experiences. 

Life after the loss of a loved one can be lonely and confusing for an adult. Imagine what it is like for a child. As a pediatrician, it is a challenge for me to understand my young patients’ perspectives in this situation and then to follow their evolving perspective as the lens of normal child development does its work.

Dovetail by Zoe Mays is a poetic reflection of a cancer diagnosis. Raw grief with each line is a reminder of patients I met on the medical, neurological, and surgical oncology wards. Mays’ poem reflects what I also captured in my drawing “Forget me not: a visual tale of a head and neck cancer patient.”

This is written as an imagined dialogue, a call and response gazzel poem of sorts, of my recent essay “Medical Maze” with Susan Ito’s Fall 2015 essay “Rounds.” The words from “Medical Maze” leads, while the words from “Rounds” respond. 

Here’s my advice: dance with the devil you know.

     Reading Quraishi’s essay brought back two of my own striking hospital elevator memories.  

A meditation on writing and self.

“I’ve been sick for a year now. Seven operations on my spinal column. Dr. Farill saved me. He brought me back the joy of life,” writes acclaimed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (252) in her diary between 1950 and 1951. Kahlo painted Self-portrait with the portrait of Dr. Farill (1951) in gratitude and recognition of her doctor for restoring her will to live. 

 Cancer also set my adulthood into being, only the cancer wasn’t my own.

I took a great course in American literature and philosophy with Professor Brian Bremen at the University of Texas at Austin last spring. In it, we read a lot of Emerson, maybe so much so, that when I re-read my poem again after it was accepted for publication, his words were the first ones that came to mind.

In reading the articles of Ali Grzywna, Deborah L. Jones, and PratyushaYalamanchi, I found a similarity with my article written with Sayantani DasGupta, which appeared in the Spring 2016 Intima. Although these articles deal with apparently different topics (studying narratives of anorexia nervosa, interviewing a family member with cancer, dealing with communicative barriers in caring for a patient, and examining Frida Kahlo’s pictorial representation of her doctor), they all show a desire to get to know and better understand the predicament of the other.

In our conflicted societal mind, a woman’s breasts are not wholly her own; they are objects of adoration and augmentation—lusted after and flaunted, idealized and demonized—at once functional and fetishized.  And when they harbor cancer, they become a campaign around which whole legions of women and men rally.