When I contemplate the relationship between my piece and Emmanuelle Descours’ I can’t help but recognize the two essential pillars upon which a healthy, ethical, personal, and effective clinical encounter may occur: 1) the act of telling and 2) the act of listening.             

I was 19 when my mother died, 19 and an only child and a senior in college and questioning my sexuality and uncertain about my future and now lacking in close relationships, familial or otherwise. 

Terrible though the subject of Tim Cunningham’s 'The Sunshine Chairs' is, set in an Ebola Treatment Unit in Sierra Leone; intense as it was to hear it read by the author, an emergency pediatric nurse who returned to New York to complete a DRPH in Public Health; and undercut by the loser-chance inbred in an epidemic, the story ends with an uplifting glow. 

Across a century, writing in a diary was an effective way for nurses to capture details of time spent by their patients in a critical care ward, a military ward, a palliative care ward. I studied each of these contexts diligently to draw out the similarities of language, of shared technical skill sets, of value.

Emily Mahew and David McArthur's article on diaries makes a good case for the value that inclusion of patient and practitioner perspectives in a written format can bring to an illness experience. It was the complete lack of this perspective that drove my research on Mary Ely, whose story had to be reconstructed largely from newspaper accounts.

In my poem “Borrowed Car,” I suggest that life-threatening illness may transform the body into an unfamiliar vehicle over which a person no longer feels she has ownership or control. This loss of perceived ownership may begin with the naming that comes with diagnosis, an act of labeling that seems a necessary part of the treatment process. However, as Arlene’s Weiner’s speaker demonstrates in “Line of Beauty,” a patient may ultimately resist certain labels and perceptions of her body as a means of reclaiming authority and determining what the literal and metaphorical scars of illness will signify.

As I read the fall literature in Intima, one that I kept coming back to was “Needle” by Sara Backer. I love her poem because it shows that for every question there are two answers.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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 describes this furtive hope. It seems a logical way of attaining every ounce of knowledge and skill through first-hand experience. He recognizes his inner quandary as he “hopes” to rid himself of the “hope” that his patients have a specific diagnosis that he, because of his education, suspects they have. He struggles with the disconnect between his wishes as a doctor and his patient’s wish for health. What a strange juxtaposition.

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 unwanted public intrusion.  Marcia Butler’s “Cancer Diva” and Katherine Mcfarlane’s “Flying into Jerusalem” illustrate this particular public quality of women’s bodies, especially during illness.   

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.

I was moved by the beauty of the writing in Susan Ito’s “Rounds” as well as by its subject matter: the centrality to her life of the hospital where she worked for years which is also the place where she met her husband, lost her first child, and, most recently, brought her 92-year-old mother to the emergency room.  It’s a profoundly resonant place that deepens in meaning as Ito passes through the different stages of her life.  This piece has inspired me to attempt a similar essay, albeit about a less obviously freighted topic, and I’d like to use this short blog assignment to sketch it out.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

 “'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.