Rooms can confine us or give us a special place to inhabit. Hallways and corridors can lead us where we want to go or lead us astray. Two works in the Fall 2016 Intima, one fiction and one nonfiction, use these physical spaces to represent the emotional struggles that come with severe or mysterious illness.
Read moreThe Heart in Harmony by poet and medical student Schneider K. Rancy
The mechanical properties of the heart are well understood. Tricuspid valve calcification may lead to stenosis, resulting in myocardial hypertrophy and decreased cardiac output. On the other end of the spectrum, mitral valve prolapse may lead to eventual mitral regurgitation. Eventually, chronic tendinous injury to the chordae tendineae attaching the valve to the papillary muscles may occur, producing a flail leaflet. It is simple: the heart strings produce the music of harmony.
But what of discord? What of when the harmony fails us?
Read moreMedicine: Finding the ordinary among the extraordinary by Dr. David Hilden
Medicine is full of the extraordinary every day. And really, how much extraordinary can one person absorb?
Read moreHistory Lessons: What Doctors Learn When Doing Patient Histories by Natasha Massoudi
We learn in medical school to take full social, family and physical histories with a new patient. We use checkboxes to run down the list of points in each history. We are taught to be thorough and document each answer.
The Importance of Transitions: A Reflection by Ob/Gyn Andrea Eisenberg
Transitions are equally important in the hospital as day shifts to night and night to day and we hand off patients we may have been taking care of the past 12 to 24 hours. Just as children need time to adjust to a transition, so do our patients as they transition to a new day, new staff, and possibly a new baby.
Read moreBeing Useful: The Emotional Transformation of A Caregiver. A Commentary on Family and Coming Together by Bekka DePew
We are often powerless in the face of death or illness to do much besides watch; we are forced to recognize “the uselessness of love to give her breath.” This feeling of helplessness we experience, both as physicians and as caretakers, forces us to reevaluate the way we understand ourselves and the purpose behind the role we play as a family member or a healthcare provider.
Read moreThis Game We Play Called “Dying." A Meditation About Being on the Sidelines by Vivian Lam
The game of death is quite addictive.
Of course, the stakes are high—it’s the end of all things, the last chance, last glance, last words. All-or-nothing; last-ditch effort. A lifetime of apologies, love, and tenderness condensed into a prognosis of months, days, a few gasping breaths.
Read moreIntrospection: At the Heart (and Art) of Medicine by Trisha Paul
As I examined
Doctors, Like The Rest of Us, Have Good Days and Bad by Nelly Edmondson
Surely, one of the best things about the practice of narrative medicine is that it allows doctors to reveal that they are just as human as the rest of us – capable of egregious mistakes as well as heroic deeds.
Read moreLetting Go—Without Letting Go: The Idea of Thinking It Over versus Giving Up by Maida Broudo
When she was diagnosed with an aggressive and rare form of ovarian cancer, I urged her to come from Albany for a second opinion and lined her up with top gynecological oncologists, and she felt safe.
Read moreTaking the Time, Finding the Words: A Reflection on Doctors Who Listen by Annie Xiao
Dialogue requires that a participant be attentive to the unspoken needs and
The Person Behind the Pattern: A Reflection about Doctors and Diagnoses by Blake Gregory
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.
Read moreOtherness Revealed: Sounds, Gestures, Stance by Kaja Weeks
Decades before, I was a college student sent on a respite mission with a severely disabled child whose braced, tethered body in a crib and relentless cries through the night completely unnerved me.
Read morePoetry as Narrative Medicine That Heals by Andrew Taylor-Troutman
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.
Read moreWhen Narrative Fails by Ellen Sazzman
But what happens to those patients for whom narrative has become a long lost ability?
Read moreWhen Speed Kills Your Ability to Listen by Melissa Rosato
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.
Read morePositive Visualization: Does It Help to Talk to Your Ailing Body? by Sarah Safford
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.
Read moreComics, Neural Plasticity and the Artistic Temperament: A Reflection by Eugenia G. Amor
“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.
Read moreThe Role of Family in Coping with Illness and Death by Kelly Goss
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.
Read moreFrida Kahlo’s Portrait of Her Doctor and My Ofrenda by Carly Bergey
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.
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