Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: The Last Heartbeat

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Cortney Davis’ “The Last Heartbeat” explores her competing identities as daughter and nurse at her dying mother’s bedside. Davis opens the poem as she holds her mother’s hand, counting her last heartbeats, witnessing her last breath. She ends with greater questions of life and soul as she walks with a friend through a cemetery.

Writing Prompt: If you’ve been at the bedside of a loved one as they died, what do you remember most? What have you forgotten? What about at the bedside of a terminal patient? Did this experience prompt greater questions about the soul? Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Reprieve

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In his poem “Reprieve,” Jeffrey Harrison writes about the several months following a cancerous brain tumor removal. Everyone is able to take a breath while the patient resumes his daily activities. Although it seemed “a miracle almost,” they “all still wondered how long it would last.” The narrator questions if this time period felt like an “afterlife” to the patient. I like how the narrator lists the simple daily tasks the patient was able to resume, giving us a glimpse into his life and what he had been missing because his illness. 

Have you or a loved one had a serious illness that, for a time, seemed resolved? How did you feel when the treatment worked? If the illness recurred, how did you look back on that time period?

Writing prompt: Think about a time when you, a patient or a loved one was well following a serious illness. Were you able to trust in that period of wellness? Were you always wondering if the illness might come back? If so, how did that undercurrent of worry limit you? How did it feel to grow strong again or resume your daily activities? Write for 10 minutes. 

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: County Hospital Residents

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Abby Caplin’s “County Hospital Residents” profiles immigrant physicians, re-training in an American residency program. Caplin’s poem begins with the more general–where a physician is from–and contracts into the more intimate details, the sequence of events that brought this person into this profession far from home.

Writing Prompt: Have you encountered an immigrant physician as a patient or through your own medical training? What was their story? Imagine leaving your home country to practice medicine and live your life elsewhere. What would be the greatest challenge? What does the diversity and experience of immigrant physicians bring to our medical community? Write for 10 minutes.

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Dinosaurs

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Ophthalmologist Maria Basile writes of the evolution of surgery in “Dinosaurs“, part of the Poetry and Medicine column in JAMA. Her poem reflects on innovations in how surgery is performed and is a commentary on the constant churn of medical reinvention. 

Have you or a loved one personally benefited from a recent medical innovation? Can you think of something important that might have been lost through adopting a medical advancement? Also consider the challenges posed by some new medical procedures and breakthroughs. When kidney dialysis first emerged as an option for treatment of kidney failure and there was very limited availability. Decisions needed to be made about who would receive this treatment. Sometimes a medical innovation raises unforeseen and difficult ethical challenges. 

Writing Prompt: Think back to when you first started medical training. How has medicine changed since that time? What were considered the greatest innovations or bioethics questions of that time? What are they now? Alternatively, think about what was considered a medical marvel when you were a child. How is that innovation viewed today? Write for 10 minutes. 

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Things My Daughter Lost In Hospitals

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Toni L. Wilkes reveals her daughter’s illness journey through her poem “Things My Daugther Lost In Hospitals” in the journal The Healing Muse. I’m struck by how she alternates between the physical, tangible losses (“a pear-shaped gallbladder”) and the more unexpected costs (“her husband’s patience”). As a reader, I almost miss the surprising and heart wrenching losses, placed innocuously among the more conventional ones. I’m compelled to return to each line and deconstruct the poem, in search of these melancholy nuggets that reveal the true toll.

Writing Prompt: List all of the things you’ve lost or gained by being a medical provider. Alternatively, list all of the things you’ve lost or gained through an illness. Consider the concrete (i.e. money) and the more intangible (i.e. time). Write for 10 minutes. 

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Line of Beauty

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Arlene Weiner writes of her post-surgical incision in “Line of Beauty,” a poem featured in the online narrative medicine journal Intima. The narrator’s physicians describe her incision site as “beautiful.” She notes the young surgeon admired her incision site “with feeling” but then left her undressed. The reader gets the impression he is appreciating his handiwork but forgetting about the patient it belongs to. Have you ever felt that way about an interaction with a medical provider?

I like how Weiner contrasts this surgery, an “insertion,” with her previous ones, including “a chunk of back punished for harboring promiscuous cells.”

Writing prompt: Think about the different words we use to describe medical procedures or ailments. How might a patient’s description differ from that of a medical provider? Does it matter what words are used? Have you ever had a doctor use a word that surprised you? Write for 10 minutes.

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Ramblings

Free Write Friday: Santiago

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I have had a week where much as been out of my control, where the bigger questions of life are asked and the daily answer is in the mundane tasks of doing the laundry, reading stories at bedtime and making sure there’s enough milk in the fridge for breakfast.

Perhaps because of this, I started cleaning out my desk at work with vigor, a task I could complete with a level of control and subsequent satisfaction, sorting through papers sitting dormant for months, maybe years. I came across a clipping of a poem, David Whyte’s “Santiago”. I don’t remember where it came from, if it was given to me by a patient or by a now-retired colleague who used to share poetry with me on Fridays when we both needed it most or if I clipped it myself at some point. Whatever the origin, it spoke to me this week, thinking about the road seen and not seen, the way forward and finding a way, and my own reflection, wondering at the “clear revelation beneath the face looking back”. Let it speak to you this week and may you always be more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way.

 

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Motherhood, Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Monday Morning

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Audrey Shafer, an anesthesiologist and mother, writes of medicine and motherhood in her mesmerizing poem “Monday Morning“. Highlighting two simple moments at home and at work, Shafer explores the contrast and commonalities between motherhood and her work in medicine. No wonder I love this piece!

What do you think of the juxtaposition of the narrator’s young son and the cool sterile environment of the operating room? The OR is a glaringly lit, predictably ordered, pristine place. As a mother, I could picture the incredible contrast of her preschooler son’s soft body clutching his favorite blanket in the dim early morning. A home with young children is often unpredictable, littered and intimate.

Shafer comments that the one who is exposed and vulnerable in this poem is the author herself. Would you agree? What do you learn about her as a person and as a working mother by reading this poem?

Writing Prompt: Think of a moment at work that reminded you of or seemed in direct contrast to a moment at home. How does your personal life inform your work and vice versa? Write for 10 minutes.

 

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Thanksgiving Dinner

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Allie Gips’ striking poem “Thanksgiving Dinner” profiles her grandparents as they suffer from dementia and recurrent cancer. Gips writes that there is “there is a forgetting that is wrenching and then there is a forgetting that must seem like some kind of forgiveness”. Gips expresses sadness watching her grandfather relive the disappointment at finding the sparkling cider bottle empty again and again. This simple act of recurrent forgetting serves as a rending reminder of the cost of his illness to family gathered at the Thanksgiving dinner table. 

Writing Prompt: Have you witnessed someone suffer the effects of dementia? Think of a particular incident, like Gips’ empty bottle, that struck a chord with you, illustrating the defecits. Write for 10 minutes. 

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Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: You Will Feel A Pinch

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With a title like “You Will Feel A Pinch“, I couldn’t help but read Marylyn Grigas’ poem in the Bellevue Literary Review. Whenever I’m doing an injection with a numbing medication for a procedure, I say exactly this: “You will feel a pinch, then a burn.” This is just how she begins.

There are so many phrases that I use automatically and repetitively with patients on a daily basis. Leaving the room for the patient to change for a physical exam, I inform: “The gown opens in the back, the paper drape unfolds over your legs.” Performing a Pap smear and gynecologic exam, I explain I’m going to “use my other hand to feel your uterus and ovaries and make sure I don’t feel any masses or anything abnormal.” I listen to the lungs on the back and ask the patient to “take deep breaths through your mouth”, then as I move to auscultate the lub-dub of the heart on the chest I ask them to “breathe normally.” I once had a patient laugh and reply, “What does that mean?” These phrases come out of our mouths, rote habit, without thought as to what a patient, who might be hearing those words for the first time, might perceive. 

After much trial and error you discover what tends to work to communicate with patients in a way they can understand. You begin to anticipate the questions they’ll ask, such as if the gown opens in the back or the front, and preempt with answers. But I think over time, over years, it becomes such second nature that the words fall out without pausing to think about the meaning.

Two years ago I had a skin lesion on my back that was bothering me and I asked my doctor to “burn” it off with liquid nitrogen. This type of so-called cryotherapy is a treatment I perform on others regularly. I always warn “this may sting” and have had incredibly varied responses, ranging from people barely flinching to  crying out in pain. When my own turn came I was acutely surprised at how painful it was, much more than just a “sting”, both during the application and for several days after. I developed a new empathy for the recipients of my cryotherapy treatment going forward. I shudder when I think of all the coaching phrases confidently uttered to my patients in labor a decade before I experienced labor pains myself. 

Why do you think Grigas opens her poem with this oft used warning? What does this phrase seem to make her think of? How does her poem evolve and what do you think it’s about?

Writing Prompt: Think about something you say regularly to patients, almost automatically. Unpack the phrase. Imagine yourself in the patient’s position hearing this for the first time and write from their perspective. What other things might come to mind when a patient hears this phrase? If you’re not a medical professional, can you think of sentences you’ve heard from doctors or nurses that were confusing or funny or easily misunderstood? Write about this for 10 minutes. 

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