In my pre-poet life using creative arts therapies with adult and pediatric cancer patients, and later, with family and friends, I was honored to attend many “good” deaths. My personal debt to hospice caregivers became immeasurable – the support they give to the dying and to survivors, how they taught me to carve my own grief.
Read moreUnconscious Memoir: Seeing My Medical Emergency from Others' Perspectives by Elisabeth Hedrick-Moser
In “A Life Less Terrifying: The Revisionary Lens of Illness,” a non-fiction piece published in the Spring 2016 Intima, writer Ann Wallace notes that “The act of living and of moving forward requires a constant recursive motion of looking back and re-visioning.” I’m newly aware of that recursive motion, as my essay “Fluid” opened an unexpected conversation with my family around my bout with sepsis pneumonia.
Read moreHow a poem entitled “All the Girls Were There, and Gorgeous” helps us reflect on illness, morality and memories by Andrew Taylor-Troutman
Andrew Taylor-Troutman earned a certificate in Narrative Healthcare from the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative through Lenoir-Rhyne University. He is a Presbyterian pastor serving a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His story “Cups and Such” appears in the Spring 2018 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
A year ago, a half-dozen older women gathered in a church fellowship hall. The coffee percolated as copies of “All the Girls Were There, and Gorgeous,” a poem by Carlene Kucharczyk in the Spring 2017 issue of Intima, were passed around our circle of chairs. As facilitator of this narrative healthcare workshop, I read the poem out loud. The gas logs hummed for a moment in the silent room. I was about to launch into questions specific to Kucharczyk’s remarkable poem when this participant spoke, quietly yet clearly: “Do you think it would be easier to have Alzheimer’s or ALS?”
A year later, her question came back to me and I wrote my little story, “Cups and Such,” not as an answer, but to continue the conversation.
Her question proposes a binary. In some ways, “Cups and Such” is the mirror opposite of Kucharczyk’s poem – a woman awake in her life, though / she doesn’t know it compared to a man fully aware of the betrayal by his body. But both poem and story deal with the same haunting theme: What is our relationship to our past? Memories flit and flash in and out of our consciousness like fireflies. Is hindsight really 20-20? Or, is it that we are continually revising our story to make meaning? “Revision” means to look again; etymologically, so does “respect.”
Skilled poets, like Kucharczyk, write with clarity yet focused ambiguity, thereby asking readers to look again and again for interpretations. We read and continue the conversation. A year later, I remember how the workshop participants were divided as to the moral character of the narrator: We do not like to visit her, / I hope she does not know. Was the narrator a “good granddaughter” or not? What is expected of us when a family member has a terminal disease? Could it be that the way the sick perceive us changes, say, from a bright shining face to the appearance of a moon? Is that cold and distant? Or, could the transformation be a natural reflection of a previous light?
And I still wonder, in Kucharczyk’s words, about the part that is elsewhere. Time is not linear. Perhaps there are moments, even in pain (whether physical or emotional or spiritual), when all the girls are gorgeous, when all is whole again and saved.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman earned a certificate in Narrative Healthcare from the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative through Lenoir-Rhyne University. His recent essays have been published online at Mockingbird (http://www.mbird.com) and his poetry at Bearings (https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings). He is a Presbyterian pastor serving a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He and his wife have three children. His story “Cups and Such” appears in the Spring 2018 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
A Matrix for Healing: Understanding the Psychic and Moral Wounds on Clinicians During Wartime by Michael Brown, OD
Dr. Brown, in his evocative and poignant essay “The Moral Matrix of Wartime Medicine,” (Intima, Fall 2015), describes his experiences as a young physician during the Vietnam War and both the immediate and long-term effects of the psychic and moral wounds he and other military medical personnel accrued while serving in combat zones.
Read moreDNR: How Hands Put Things In Order by Catherine Klatzker
In this Crossroads blog, poet Catherine Klatzker reflects on another poet's work in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
the lyrical dancer within
Read moreTime 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.
Read moreEnter: 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.
Read moreMixed Meanings: How Parallel Conversations Between Doctors and Patients Can Affect A Diagnosis by Rohini Harvey
Sometimes words are just words and it is the listener’s interpretation, rather than the speaker’s intent, that give them meaning.
Read moreThe Chaos Narrative and Other Disrupted Life Stories by Jennifer Rebekah Hartmark-Hill
In her thought-provoking piece, “Dovetail,” the poet Zoe Mays reflects on the unsettled decision-making abilities of an acquaintance with cancer. “Did I say this would make sense?” summarizes the patient’s philosophy on her condition and the cacophony of chain reactions that characterize her after diagnosis.
Read moreWords to the Wiser: A Chronology of Narrative Appreciation for Westcott’s “Bright is the Ring of Words.” by Kirk Hathaway
reading Richard Westcott’s “Bright is the Ring of Words,” in the Spring 2107 Field Notes was the watering for that seed of idea that encourages us to always listen to the story of a patient or person we are facing.
Read moreWitnessing the Power of Story by Josephine Ensign
Chaos stories can be “told” through metaphor, gesture, and image. We need to find ways to expand our capacity to listen to these types of patient (or family member or community) stories.
Read moreEye/Witness by Patricia Brenneman
We are
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?
Read moreLearning to Speak Meaningfully When Meaning Evades Us by Laura Anne White
This truth became inescapable when I began my nursing career on a cancer and hospice floor. Oncology care is fraught with the observation of suffering. The desire to find meaning in pain converges with the harshness of reality. Why
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.
Read moreDenying Demons: A Meditation on PTSD and Vietnam Veterans by Billie Holladay Skelley
Our verbal and written stories tie us together and promote understanding. They help us to work through traumatic experiences, to acknowledge our demons, and to heal.
Read moreToo Little Skin for These Bones: A Meditation on Poetry and Illness by Sydney Sheltz-Kempf
Illnesses are contagious.
We all know this, but while the frame on the bed grows ever smaller, sometimes the faces of the grieving grow gaunt as well.
Read moreIt’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.
Read moreOn Waiting: A Meditation on Waiting Rooms by Sara Lukinson
No one, not even someone you love, can fill the hollowness. Still you cannot walk this alone. You need a witness, an errand goer, a soft presence, a light in the hallway. Someone who brings you tea or clean clothes, whose eyes will look back into yours.
When I looked up from all the waiting rooms, I found a communion of once-strangers waiting to help me
Read moreWhat Emily Post Has to Teach Us About Cultural Competency in the Clinical Encounter by Olaf Kroneman
What to do?
In 1927, in his lecture to Harvard medical students, the terminally ill Francis Peabody M.D. provided the answer, “the secret in caring for the patient, is in caring for the patient.”
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