After the long hours and intense learning curve of my Emergency Medicine residency, I had become one of those efficient robots who could solve medical puzzles and save lives, but I felt empty, disconnected—the classic symptoms of burn-out. I was once a wide-eyed, empathetic intern constantly criticized for trying to solve their patient’s chronic issues. I remember one attending saying, “Figure out the least amount of things you need to do to rule out an emergency.” I see now that he was trying to teach me efficiency.
Read moreGrowth is Not Linear: A Reflection on Recovery and Healing by Sujal Manohar
I skimmed through “Eight Months after a Suicide Attempt” (Spring 2015 Intima) once as I perused articles in past issues of Intima. But I came back to it, read it again, and again. Andrea Rosenhaft’s non-fictional and personal narrative speaks to the nonlinear recovery process after mental illness. It is also a deeply vulnerable account of the realities of suicidal depression.
Read moreBecoming the Superheroes Our Parents Need: The Journey from Child to Worthy Caretaker by Usman Hameedi
Our parents are often our first examples of superheroes. They make gourmet meals from minimum wage, give hugs that vanquish our demons, and provide limitless love. They are impervious to damage or decay and are always ready to save our days. So, seeing the human in them, the mortality in their breath is unsettling. When they come to need us, we feel so grossly unprepared.
Read moreCaring for Our Caregivers: A short reflection by poet and hematology-oncology nurse Nina Solis
Caregivers deserve patience, gratitude and comfort just as much as those they support. As healthcare providers, we all could use a reminder to advocate for these irreplaceable members of a patient’s team.
Read moreLady Psychiatrist Queen: Compassion in Caregiving, a reflection by Eileen Vorbach Collins
Lisa Jacobs, in her nonfiction piece, March Manic (Intima Spring 2019) describes a long shift on a psychiatric unit. She is “beyond exhausted” to the point of having questioned her own grasp on reality.
As a case manager in a Baltimore City hospital, I once spent hours attempting to find placement for a homeless 19-year-old addicted to heroin who needed long term IV antibiotics. When I asked if I might call her mother she replied “I don’t give a fuck” but retracted her permission as I was leaving the room. I pretended not to hear. The next day I was told she had signed out AMA (Against Medical Advice). a colleague said, “Get over it. She was a waste of time and resources.”
Read moreThresholds and Transgressions, a reflection on ICU chaos, communitas, liminality and Levinas by Nancy Smith
Nancy Smith is a retired Registered Nurse. Though she moved through the many domains of hospital nursing, most of her work took place in an Intensive Care Unit. Her co-workers noticed that she would place small strips of paper with poems by various authors on her locker from time to time along with the pictures of her family.
Read moreHow to Hold Cold Hands by Laura-Anne White
I have spent my career as a nurse working with adult cancer patients. I, too, have experience with the self-protective tool of ‘numbing.’ Last spring, the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City at full force, and I was temporarily transferred to an inpatient, COVID-19-positive cancer unit. I saw no one aside from co-workers, patients, and other essential workers.
Read moreOn Trauma, Hope and Dragonslayers, an essay by hospital-based physical therapist Galen Schram
Can what we know about PTSD in frontline workers who treated the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings help us understand how to care for our COVID-19 frontline workers? What will be done to understand and treat race-based traumatic stress, a term I hadn’t heard until this summer?
Read moreWho Draws First? A reflection about racial stereotyping by Dr. Ibrahim Sablaban
So, who draws first? Figuratively speaking. In America, someone’s going to draw. Someone’s going to attack and define you by some arbitrary standard. And that someone could be anyone.
Read moreFinding What's Essential in Just Laundry: Painting and Poetry in Dialogue By Alexis Rehrmann
In both the painting and the poem, these particulars are gone but the objects remain and hold an impression of that past life. There’s honor in caring for these objects, in both our daily work and our creative lives.
Read moreMy COVID Hero: How Art Helped Me Reflect on a Global Pandemic by Dr. Brandon Mogrovejo
One late evening, just two months into my intern year in Pediatrics and seven months into a forever changed New York City, I sat down and drew. I drew from a place of anxiety, working the equivalent of two full-time jobs in a hospital during a time when the people I care for, my loved ones and my patients, were under great strain.
Read more“A Line Blurring Joy and Grief”: Empathizing from a Distance, by Daniel Ginsburg
How do clinicians carry on their vital work without bearing the grief of patients and their families, yet still comfort them?
Read moreCaught between Floating and Drowning, a reflection about poetry, memory and adapting to chaos by Mikayla Brockmeyer
A state of flux. The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a state of “How will I react to _____?” Listlessness and emotional exhaustion bring about feelings of isolation and longing to be somewhere we are not. Yet, in learning to modify behaviors, collaborations have emerged.
In the opening couplet to Sheila Kelly’s poem entitled “Breathe” (Fall 2017 Intima). she sets the stage and introduces a poignant metaphor, depicting calmness, yet incertitude.
You are floating in the swimming pool again.
Your childhood best friend rises like prayer.
“Breathe” was penned well before the current pandemic, yet the feelings of serenity and safety one day, and panic the next, expressed are relevant today. Using a second-person narrative, she paints a vivid picture of a disjointed home life, sifting through old, painful memories. In the poem, the main character is catapulting between chaos and “floating in the swimming pool.” At the end, I interpret a sense of adaptation from the character that leaves a residue of hope.
In my essay “Turbulent Undertow” (Fall 2020 Intima), parallel feelings are grappled with, as I describe a surfing attempt, and later, my experience as a hospitalist scribe. Woven together, I write about two near-drowning experiences: on surfing and on caring for patients with COVID-19. The best friend in Sheila Kelly’s poem encourages the main character to put on her old swimsuit when distressed. After a long series of days working with the hospitalist, I, too, wanted to offer solace. But instead, all I could offer was “Glad you’re okay,” a phrase that has reverberated through my brain ever since I first heard it myself.
Riding metaphorical surfboards together and finding ways to float in metaphorical swimming pools may not be the best solution to curb the emotional toll of the pandemic. However, validation and shared human connection serve as two ways to avoid possible drowning amidst the pandemic waves.
Mikayla Brockmeyer
Mikayla Brockmeyer is a first year osteopathic medical student at Des Moines University in Des Moines, Iowa. She began working as a hospitalist scribe in 2018, while she was enrolled in the Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences program at Des Moines University. She successfully defended her thesis in 2019 and spent her gap year scribing full time. This is her first time showcasing her storytelling abilities in a public arena. Her non-fiction essay “Turbulent Undertow” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
‘Differential Diagnosis’ Can Be A Lifesaver, a Reflection by Colleen Corcoran
© Differential Diagnosis by Yan Emily Yuan Spring 2020 Intima A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Accurate differential diagnosis can save a life. By being able to determine clearly how one outlying factor or the combination of a group of signs and symptoms tips the scale to the correct pattern confirmation and treatment, our lives can be shaped, saved and lost in this qualifying lens of time. It’s integral to the practice of medicine, but also in many ways to how we make decisions in life. A positive or negative result, a clustering of symptoms, the ticked boxes and specimen samples that can reveal so much as to how we define our experiences of life and are able to move forward.
Read moreFinding Our Way Home: A Reflection on New Year's Day 2021 by Priscilla Mainardi
In these troubled times of sickness and loss, of protest and division, it’s uplifting to read about positive actions, such as those I took for a dying friend, which I describe in my piece “To Melinda” (Fall 2020 Intima). Two other works in the Fall 2020 Intima also describe small positive acts that make a difference in people’s lives. Reading them eases our sense of helplessness by offering us hope.
Read moreAlways Tell The Truth, Except When It’s Maladaptive by Douglas Krohn
In the most neurotic days of the pandemic, I return home from my contaminated workplace, and sincerely offer my wife solace . . . in the form of a big fat lie. On another day, I confide in her the loss of a colleague . . . and wound her with the facts.
Read moreAttunement: Reflecting on the Art of Making a Difference by Catherine Klatzker
Empathy and compassion arise from sensitizing events, often many. Sometimes it’s easier than others to track those events to their origins. Patient Jane provided student-doctor Brian Sou with one such activating event. (Field Notes “A Student’s Moment in NYC’s Most Famous Hospital”) In their first encounter, Sou writes “I did not manage to comfort Jane in her moment of vulnerability, when she needed someone to do so the most. I was so interested in the medical aspect of curing that I completely neglected the compassionate side of healing.”
Read moreLosing Touch: How COVID-19 Has Interfered With the Way We Bond by Adam Lalley, MD
The intimacy of touch is deeply rooted in vulnerability, and COVID-19 is reminding us that this vulnerability is biological as well as emotional. For Dr. Vlasic, touch was an act of trust, but nowadays trust seems best measured by how far apart we stand and how carefully we obscure the lower half of our faces.
Read moreBeing a Patient: Coping with the Loss of Control and Privacy in a Hospital by Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
Patients often feel unexpectedly confined in the hospital.
Read moreA Physician's Response in an Emergency: Humility Complements Competence by Rachel Fleishman
Watching a medical emergency as a physician who is not functioning as a leader or caretaker unearths discomfort, a mingling of denied identity with humility. And it is from this vantage that we can harness the power of narrative medicine to create space for reflection, to make sense of medicine and how it unfolds.
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