Rachel Mindrup’s artwork, “Running Late” (Studio Art, Intima, Fall/Winter 2024), captures many facets of the healthcare experience, but the computer screen—and all it represents—tugs at me on every viewing. Modern medicine means point-of-service documentation and administrative pressures that often make for less humanity in healthcare than we once knew. Despite this, deep interconnections between patients, families and providers happen daily.

Running Late - Rachel Mindrup — © *Running Late. Rachel Mindrup.* Variable print.

My first instinctive response to “Running Late,” however, was envisioning myself, heavy head in hands, hiding in an empty room, exhaling emotions while permitting life in a pediatric trauma hospital to catch up with me. To Mindrup, who is an associate professor of drawing and painting and the Richard L. Deming, MD Endowed Chair in medical humanities at Creighton University and her son, wondering why they wait, here are reasons I run late:

In the rush of coordinating schedules, treatment plans, and clarifying medical details, I suddenly remember to pee and hydrate en route to three consecutive hours of patient care.
So focused on mentally cramming critical information from charts before I can safely help patients move, or on furiously typing notes, I overlook the time.
Therapy sessions get interrupted by uncontrolled bodily functions that take precedence. Soiled diapers, vomit, secretions, tube feedings, excessive pain, and complicated line management: all cause delays.
A distraught parent stops me in the hall, informing me her child is headed back to the ICU. I’m a familiar face in an impossible moment, able to provide a supportive hug and gentle words, then dash tardily on to my next appointment, while containing stunned tears.
On the day described in my piece, A Prescription for Grief (Nonfiction, Intima, Spring/Summer 2025), my PT partner and I watch ICU monitors as one screen goes black. Her heart and respirations have terminated before our eyes: an 11-year-old is dead. We breathe somberly together. We were due in another child’s room eight minutes ago, and must decide to forge on.

I am well practiced at stuffing feelings aside until later—or until never—in favor of being less late for the next child and family. While we face every ounce of what it is to be human in this work, often there is no time for grief, because of the systemic and administrative burdens represented by Mindrup’s computer screen, and because we know what it means to make you wait.