Dialogue requires that a participant be attentive to the unspoken needs and wishes of the other. It requires that pain and grief be acknowledged, respected, and only then, comforted.  

There’s something you should know about your doctor’s clinical judgement: It relies on a flawed premise. As doctors, our medical education conditions us to look for patterns. Pattern recognition allows us to triage and identify emergencies. It helps us distinguish pulled muscles from heart attacks. It’s a powerful, if imperfect, tool.

Jenny Qi's poem first caught my attention because I carry two lines from Bob Hass: All the new thinking is about loss / In this it resembles all the old thinking. Death is the great equalizer, each of us must confront mortality. 

 But what happens to those patients for whom narrative has become a long lost ability? 

My essay "This Story," published in the most recent Intima, is about bearing witness to a patient's story. Practitioners often view this dialogue as obvious psychobabble: Of course, we must listen to patients. Sadly, most practitioners think they are listening but are not truly doing this work. 

Nowadays, with super high tech imaging and flexible mini microscopes that explore and photograph our insides, it’s pretty easy to visualize our physiology. We can picture what we are made of and how our bodies are working, or not working, in extreme close up detail.  This is useful for doctors and scientists, and for the rest of us, it can be terrifying or fun, or both simultaneously.  

“Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain”.

This quote reminds me the concept of neural plasticity, which I have explored within my comic “Gray Matter” in the Fall 2016 Intima, a phenomena leveraged by surgeons and researchers in order to achieve a more extensive resection of gliomas without damaging functional areas of the brain. 

Jung argued that spiritual leaders no longer exist to listen to stories of illness, and so the doctor was given this important task. We were left asking ourselves who will listen to patients' stories of illness and their anxieties about death if doctors are unable to do so. 

When I first read this essay, I looked up at my picture of Frida. Why is she really she in my office? What do I want her to invite people to feel? The truth is: I’ve been in pieces before. 

Every person has a story, and every story is different.

Memories aren’t always pretty, a fact that Jenny Qi’s poem, “Writing Elegies Like Robert Hass,” directly addresses.  

If simply living life revises what we know to be real, neither I, nor anyone else can ever recapture what in fact we experienced. All that remains of our past are our emotionally true memories, colored by our current state of mind. 

A piece, music and piece, part of body, maybe not really bone or marrow but not the whole, and doesn't piece sound like peace? Peace in the valley, maybe, or the grave and we are back to my piece. Tense is like a violin string, taut, or is it "taught me to love the Brahms D Major"? 

A strong attribute of narrative medicine is to find common ground, the universal that shines through in the particulars of each individual experience of illness and the healing journey. I appreciate the opportunity to compare and contrast a companion poem in Intima with my own.

Dixon Yang’s non-fiction “The Bright Speck,” published in the Spring 2016 issue of Intima, struck me as a bright contrast to my short story based on my experiences. 

Life after the loss of a loved one can be lonely and confusing for an adult. Imagine what it is like for a child. As a pediatrician, it is a challenge for me to understand my young patients’ perspectives in this situation and then to follow their evolving perspective as the lens of normal child development does its work.

Dovetail by Zoe Mays is a poetic reflection of a cancer diagnosis. Raw grief with each line is a reminder of patients I met on the medical, neurological, and surgical oncology wards. Mays’ poem reflects what I also captured in my drawing “Forget me not: a visual tale of a head and neck cancer patient.”

This is written as an imagined dialogue, a call and response gazzel poem of sorts, of my recent essay “Medical Maze” with Susan Ito’s Fall 2015 essay “Rounds.” The words from “Medical Maze” leads, while the words from “Rounds” respond. 

Here’s my advice: dance with the devil you know.