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A prose poem titled "What is Getting you Through these Days " was selected for inclusion in the Michigan State University's upcoming exhibition titled "Creativity in the time of COVID-19."
Learn more here: https://dhlc.cal.msu.edu/creativity-in-the-time-of-covid-19/ Bellevue Literary Review nominated "1:00AM Refill" for a 2022 Pushcart Prize:
https://blreview.org/recent-news/2022-pushcart-prize-nominees/ I had a blast curating and participating in a #medhumchat focused on appreciating the ordinary. It featured a poem by Pat Schneider and a short essay by Rachel Fleishman. Check out the reading guides below:
1) The Everyday 2) The Patience of Ordinary Things What is getting you through these days? I ask this to faces caged in little rectangles on my computer. Postage stamp-sized faces in dim light, in dark bedrooms, on bedspreads and in parked cars. A new jigsaw puzzle, they tell me. I splurged on a new pair of fuzzy socks. In the late afternoon, after I over-enthusiastically wave goodbye and close the tiny shutter on my laptop camera, I find solace in taking a pasta making class. The simplicity of mixing just two ingredients to form a mass—flaky, sticky, shedding flour. I knead the craggy dough until it is smooth and elastic. I learn to cut small pieces off a rope of dough, and squish and drag each nub of dough against a surface until it furls into a little hollow. The task is repetitive, satisfying, little pasta potato bugs dancing across the board. This gets me through long days of telemedicine in my cold home office. What is getting you through these days? I’m window shopping online,” a patient tells me wistfully. I overflow my virtual cart with every lovely, expensive item I want, and then “x” out the fantasy when it’s time to start making dinner. Seven full months into the pandemic, a Friday night. My partner looks at me, and deadpans: “I dunno, maybe we should just stay in tonight?” For some reason I can’t stop laughing. The joke gets me through the next three weekends. I’m getting really good at Sudoku. I’m rediscovering my love of old Westerns. I watch the squirrels playing outside my window. They distract me. Last summer, I booked a campsite for one night. Close to the cities. Tent under the trees. Nylon hammock under the stars. Smell of smoke stuck in my hair. Irregular party lights of fireflies blinking above. Cool blues pastel pink sunset over the hill. The shock of two iridescent yellow eyes, peering at me from the forest. The thrill of a harmless scare. Mystery novels and gummy fruit snacks, an adult patient sheepishly confides. I discovered they’re a perfect combination. An article about baking bread in Lyon, France. It was a small gift, to open a magazine and enter a world of yeast, early mornings, salty French characters, a messy kitchen, pain au chocolat. It came out months ago, when I couldn't read anything else about the virus. I imagined editors fighting over email over whether to still publish essays about pastries, in the midst of 2020. How could they? How could they not? We need it. I needed it. What is getting you through these days? Published on February 3, 2021, in the University of Minnesota Center for Art of Medicine, artistic antidote for a pandemic
JMWW publishes Small Gratitudes, "a weekly, non-exhaustive list (curated by Steven Genise) of the experiences that make us human." Check out my small gratitude here.
This post originally appears in The Intima: a journal of narrative medicine Crossroads blog
No matter how many years we spend studying textbooks of medicine, nothing can prepare us for the clinical world. On my very first rotation, a patient said he had a question for me while I was pre-rounding at 7 am. I was nervous, thinking I wouldn’t know enough about his medical condition to answer any questions. He asked me if he would be able to get a pair of pants to wear during his physical therapy session. He explained that yesterday he wore only a gown and felt “well, rather exposed.” I will never forget my feeling of bewilderment at hearing that: How come no one had thought to give him a pair of pants before he walked the hallways? Nothing prepares us for the indignities of the hospital—batteries of tests, the gowns designed to allow frequent physical exams, the narrow hallways. It scarcely allows privacy, a sense of control, or a patient’s say in the daily routine. In “The Choice” Keenan Whitesides describes this dynamic beautifully. He asks a patient whether she would like to get out of bed: Do you mean I have a choice?” she asked. Her voice was barely above a whisper and her eyes danced with hope as she searched my face for an answer. I nodded my head and we were suspended for a moment in time, as she savored the luxury of choice, something she had longed for so greatly in her time in the hospital but so rarely received. This piece is a sorrowful, lovely reminder of how powerless the hospital can make patients feel, at the mercy of decision makers that make up the treatment team. It is often the new students, with only one foot in the clinical world, who are most attuned to this loss. In “Double Black Doors,” Moragi struggles with keeping a patient with suicidal ideation on a locked psychiatric floor. This haunting and honest piece explores the medical student’s complicity in taking away freedom in the dubious pursuit of health. Like an aggressive cancer, her depression only ever came back, worse than the time before. And now, we sat around at morning rounds, scratching our heads. What else was there to do? The answer, really, was nothing. There was nothing to do. Nothing to do except the right thing to do. To free her. To give her the freedom she begged for every day. As trainees in medicine, we are caught off guard during initial clinical rotations, as we learn the hospital feels like a prison for so many patients. On psychiatry rotations, we see how the mind can be another kind of prison. We are shocked, even ashamed of our team’s power over our patient’s daily freedoms. It was a pandemic and sudden changes in daily life that led me to ponder the confinement I describe in my piece “Confined,” but as these authors clearly illustrate, confinement has always defined the hospital. |