Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Hospital Writing Workshop

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Poet and physician Rafael Campo describes the magic that can occur in a “Hospital Writing Workshop.” Campo starts the poem at the end of his clinical workday, “arriving late, my clinic having run / past 6 again.” Campo is teaching a workshop for “students who are patients.” He notes the distinction that “for them, this isn’t academic, it’s / reality.” These are patients with cancer, with HIV, and Campo is guiding them through poetry and writing exercises to search for healing and respond in a unique way to their disease and suffering.

Campo outlines his lesson, asking the students to “describe / an object right in front of them.” Each interprets their own way, to much poignancy. One student “writes about death, / her death, as if by just imagining / the softness of its skin … she might tame it.” In the end, this poem is about the power of poetry and art for both the patient and the medical provider. It’s about how something as simple as a writing workshop can cause us to pause, “take / a good, long breath” and move through suffering to a kind of healing, to a kind of hope.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Disease’s Gifts

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In “Disease’s Gifts,” poet Joy Ladin muses on fear and life and death in the face of illness. Ladin outlines the paradoxes of disease: “That you can be fearless / when fear is all you have” and that “you aren’t alone in loneliness.” This poem is an encouragement, a call to overcome and accept and succeed, even though “fear inverts / the meaning of success.” Ladin’s poem resonates because it offers words of hope while acknowledging the incongruity of illness. Disease can feel like “the end of the world,” and yet, Ladin contends, we all want to believe “you will survive it.”

Writing Prompt: What gifts, if any, have you experienced through illness? What role do you think fear plays in disease? Review Ladin’s list in the second to last stanza; what do you need to live? Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Game of Catch

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Noah Stetzer’s poem “The Game of Catch” is featured in the current issue of the Bellevue Literary Review as well on Poetry Daily. Stetzer begins by describing an “idyllic” game of catch, then expands his narrative, including idioms and phrases the word catch might conjure up.

As the poem progresses it becomes more intimate, more ominous, a recounting of Stetzer’s own story of “catching” from another: “in my voice, catch my breath, no-it’s when small blue flame/ignites kindling; the kind of catch that’s alone in itself the thing/one avoids…” Stetzer guides the reader through his own experience of catching an illness that, though “unexpected,” also seemed “inevitable” and ultimately leaves us with the idea that this is a game we all play.

Writing Prompt: Take another word commonly used in medicine: treat, contract, mass, inject. Think of all the other ways this word is used, in idioms or otherwise. What is surprising or illustrative about the words we use in illness and health? Alternatively, think of a time you “caught” a disease from another person. Maybe it was a stranger or someone you knew intimately. Did you feel, as Stetzer did, that it was “unexpected” but also “inevitable?” Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Locked-in Syndrome

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Pakistani bioethicist Anika Khan reviews Jean-Dominique Bauby’s remarkable story in her essay “Locked-in syndrome: inside the cocoon.” In it, she describes how Bauby, an editor of a prominent magazine who suffered a debilitating stroke, lived out his days entirely paralyzed but with mental clarity completely intact. Bauby’s only method of communication, and how he eventually wrote his 1997 book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was by blinking with his left eyelid. He used a French alphabet provided by his speech therapist to painstakingly blink his way to communication with the outer world.

Khan relays some of Bauby’s remarkable insights into living in such a state and she also reflects on how medical providers need to take a “more empathetic look at the incapacity and helplessness experienced not only by patients with locked-in syndrome, but by analogy, other patients who have no way of giving voice to their experience of sickness. Often, patients become diseases, numbers and syndromes to healthcare professionals who have repeatedly seen illness and have lost the capacity to relate to the experiences of patients.”

Writing Prompt: Have you as a patient ever felt misunderstood by your medical provider? What were you trying to relay and what was the response that revealed to you the miscommunication? Think about your visceral reaction to this encounter. As providers, what specifically have you done to combat the risk of patients becoming “diseases, numbers and syndromes?” How do you maintain this empathy while still preserving some emotional boundaries? Write for 10 minutes.

 

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