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. 

Therefore this article spoke to me as I’d written my poem based on Gurney’s words thinking about some of the people I’d worked with in the hospital; the dreadful hell that was going on inside each one as s/he reverted to an animal state before they could emerge to recognise themselves again. This can be replicated in warfare. It’s the closed community of war or hospitalization that can bring different states of being for each individual. So much so that they can barely recognise the person they once were.

The act of writing allows us to not only express intimate emotions, but also preserve the most sacred of stories. Storytelling, after all, is at the very heart of medicine. Listening and appreciating these stories, therefore, is just as important as representing and preserving them.

Patients often accuse doctors of having a "God complex." Maybe it is the patients who turn doctors into gods. Maybe we need to look beyond that one function of healing. Maybe we need to see the doctors as human beings.

Holly helps me befriend “high-tech,” perhaps for the first time—I can clearly picture those frozen embryonic cells as babes-to-be. And I’m transported back to hard-scrabble Glasgow, Scotland. To Annie, a fourteen-year-old lassie from the Gorbals, Glasgow’s biggest slum, who’d just given birth, on New Year’s Eve, 1973, to micro-preemie twins (father unknown). Far from being yearned for, these new arrivals were decidedly unwelcome—at least to their great-grandmother, already raising three other children, alongside Annie, in a single tenement room with a multi-family outdoor privy. 

“How many voices do I hear I in a day?” asks Susan Hannah in her piece “Voices” (Field Notes, Fall 2011).  Twice I read that line and twice I heard my story’s main character, Holt Worliss, speak in his slow, Kootenay drawl: “Well, how many didn’t ya hear?  Not mine — not my daughter’s.”  

Mayhew and McArthur focus mainly on the value to patients and families of having nurses “courageously” see their patients’ experiences and document those observations with compassion. In these narrative records, which clearly move beyond the confines of formal healthcare documentation, it seems important to also recognize that, in formulating this narrative for others, the nurse also benefits on a personal level. 

Adler’s poem illustrates with elegance what I experienced personally and what my wise patient tried to teach me. If there is anything good about Parkinson’s, pulmonary fibrosis or any other chronic, incurable disease, it is the time it gives to remember, to appreciate, to love in spite of a different theology or political leaning and time to prepare for the inevitable appointment that modern medicine might postpone, but never cancel.

Humor does productive work. Successful jokes are those that require us to synthesize information and make new meaning.  Then is it any real surprise to see humor at work in stories about those moments that are often also the most difficult? Situations of illness and disease; caregiving and hardship; life and its inevitable loss.

 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.