Time of Death: How Clinicians Cope with A Patient's Final Moments by Anna Belc

I found so much comfort in Thomas J Doyle’s non-fiction piece "To Pronounce." He writes so vividly of entering a patient’s room to quietly declare time of death that I find myself standing right next to him, feeling the sadness he is describing. He has learned over time to honor the moment.  I hope that one day I will feel less lost when faced with the end of someone’s life.

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Enter: The Child Life Specialist by Janet Cincotta

Both “The Room” by Jodi Palik (Fiction/Fall 2016) and “The Last Stand” by Kelley Yuan (Studio Art) address the way children experience illness—from their unspoken fears, to their keen powers of observation, to their profound intuition about matters they may not understand. In my piece, “The Pull of Gravity” (Nonfiction/Fall 2017), I consider the long-term emotional and psychological aftermath of serious childhood illness as it played out in my family.

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How Doctors Respond to 'Difficult' Patients: A Reflection by Kendra Peterson, MD

In Sarah Shirley’s poem ‘Wernicke-Korsakoff’ (Intima, Spring, 2017), she elucidates the dilemma of caring for a patient who is angry, non-compliant, inarticulate, hostile, confused, or otherwise “difficult”. How do we reach across the barriers that such patients present, to find an opening through which we can glean from them the information we need to take care of them, and to establish mutual trust? 

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Calling to Question: A Reflection on Healthcare Providers’ Perceptions of Life and Death by Tharshika Thangarasa

Life and death, as blatantly simple as they may seem from a purely physiological standpoint, are rather complex phenomena. Healthcare practitioners witness life and death a countless number of times. They are taught the intricacies of the human body: how to optimize its function and how to declare it deceased. Yet, nothing can prepare even the masters of this trade to face their own demise.

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It’s a Pisser: Considering two sides of kidney disease by Larry Oakner

I first discovered I had Minimal Change Disease, the mildest form of nephrotic syndrome, when a routine insurance urine examination came back with higher than normal protein.  Up until then, I assumed that foamy urine was a by-product of what I’d eaten or had to drink. In Sarah Safford’s poem, “A Cute Kidney Failure” from The Intima Fall 2016 issue, she asks the same question, “Kidneys, shmidneys, who thinks about them.”  After my initial diagnosis, I did. A lot.

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