Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine Monday: Why Doctors Should Read Fiction

No Comments

Sam Kean’s article in The Atlantic, “Why Doctors Should Read Fiction,” highlights what many medical schools, residencies and medical groups are realizing: medical providers and patients alike benefit from physicians taking an interest in literature. Kean asks, “if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine?”

Kean’s article outlines a study in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point.” The study found that “certain literary exercises…can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.”

Students rewrite and dissect short stories that expose an ethical case study, such as physician-writer Richard Seltzer’s “Fetishes.” The study’s author, Woods Nash, argues that “short stories are far more effective means of teaching students and health-care professionals to wrestle with the mess, to pay attention to narrative perspective and detail, and to become more comfortable with ambiguity.”

Writing Prompt: Have you read a piece of fiction that outlined a certain bioethical dilemma? Do you agree with Kean’s assertion that doctors should read fiction? How might the practice prove beneficial to a medical provider? Read Seltzer’s “Fetishes” and rewrite the story in short form, as a poem or case study. What new insight do you gain from this exercise? Write for 10 minutes.

Continue Reading

Ramblings

Free Write Friday: Study

No Comments

She lays out her highlighters, gathers her papers. She attended a review course with peers months ago, took notes from the lectures, sitting three quarters of the way back where she always can be found. She’s sorted the lecture slides, distilled the notes into neat documents organized by medical topic. She prepares to study.

The test only comes every ten years. She last took it at the end of her twenties, freshly graduated, freshly married. Studying was familiar then, she had no distractions. Now a decade later, three children and mid-career obligations provide frequent interruptions.

She sits in front of the computer screen in the early evening after tucking her eldest into bed, bleary-eyed from a full day’s work. She answers multiple choice question after multiple choice question, has to quit quizzing by 9 p.m. and crawl into bed.

She over-highlights her notes, as she always has. Neon yellow streaks her notebook so much that it doesn’t draw the eye to the critical as it should. She’s always been wary of leaving something out, letting a tidbit go, afraid she’ll miss it later on. She records even the most basic fact in black and white in case it escapes her overburdened mind. The result is too much retained, significance lost in overabundance. So much kept, she can’t tell what’s important anymore.

Prone to anxiety but gifted with compulsion, she never liked taking tests but survived the most examined profession. She sits for it again in two weeks, the boards. She’ll present her photo ID and settle into a straight backed chair, be issued her tiny whiteboard and dry erase marker. She’ll stare at a computer for six hours, interpret electrocardiograms and select the most appropriate treatment plan from the multiple choices.

Just after lunch her mind will become boggy. She’ll have to push through the examination fatigue, conjure the will to concentrate on each each vital sign, each lab result. She’ll muster renewed energy close to the end, sensing it near. She’ll collapse at completion, simultaneously buoyed by elation, as if she’s run a marathon, as if she’s climbed a mountain. And she has, in a way. She’s deposited all that information, stuffed into the recesses of her thoroughly educated synapses into the Prometric receptacle. She’ll be done. At least for another ten years.

Continue Reading

Ramblings

Free Write Friday: Starbucks

No Comments

They line up outside the first storefront: the trim an earthier green, the logo more organic, subtly suggestive, less polished. They take selfies and wait patiently to order grande peppermint mochas. I shuffle by them onto the cobblestone street, eager to reach the Chinese bakery to collect barbecue pork filled humbow, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves, buttery almond cookies that leave a residual crumble. I admire the fruit stands: large trays of plump grapes, squat persimmon, rainbow carrots gathered with twine. The flowers and the flying fish are, like the coffee shop, iconic, each wrapped in waxy paper, rubber-banded for the journey home.

***

I spot the familiar logo from across the street. Sweat sticking to my back, a rushing wall of air conditioning bowls me over as I step inside the coffee shop. The decor is the same, artwork familiar, stout brown chairs circle round veneer tables. I step back home, into anytown Starbucks despite being thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean on a tiny island of an idyllic archipelago. It’s the brand, what people expect, what they want to see. But I bristle at the cookie-cutter likeness, even as it comforts me. I order an iced latte from the awkward Thai barista, clad in the familiar bright green apron with emblazoned mermaid. I grab my cup with my head slightly down, a kind of apology. But I sip the milky caffeine eagerly, my American thirst quenched.

***

In college I would study at the one on the Ave, in medical school at the one in Madison Park. I’d order my drink and settle down at a table, spread my textbooks and notecards out just so, like surgical instruments lined up for an important procedure. I’d highlight and underline: red, green and blue. Star and paraphrase, chart and summarize. After hours of sitting I’d grow stiff, have to stand to stretch my muscles, hinge my joints. One time my strained neck raised to the hum of whispers: Howard Schultz, the owner of the ubiquitous coffee chain had stopped in for his own caffeinated drink. Someone mumbled that he lived in the neighborhood, came into this particular Starbucks from time to time. Tall, with an open confidence, he didn’t linger. I wondered what his drink of choice would be.

Continue Reading