Taking Care of Time by Cortney Davis

For the third time in as many weeks I’m reading Cortney Davis’s Taking Care of Time. I’m constantly jotting notes and underlining words, for every poem has a line I want to remember. I am grateful to the nurse Davis is and in awe of the nurse writer she has become. She sees under the skin of our lives, accepts and captures us in her poetry.

The first section takes Davis from practicing student to practitioner: I stabbed oranges until my hands ran with juice, then the patients until my hands ran with grace. Quickly she learns what nurses signify when we are outside of our hospital clinic setting — in the physicality of touch and embrace — but it is early in her surgical rotation where she prays as she recognizes her calling: Let this be, let this be, my life’s work.

In “Stoned,” she learns to distinguish the smell of death, unraveling it from under the smell of marijuana and hospital rooms. Driving home, a radio update on the weather takes her thoughts to the rise and fall of the body’s temperature until she collects herself — the weather — she says out loud — - the weather. That’s all.

It may be in the woman’s clinic where Davis truly loses her heart, as she receives her young patients. She sees beyond the narrow mouth of a vaginal speculum and the reach of her hands cupping a budding uterus, while hearing the nervous words and beating hearts of her young patients, who come to her with their anxious mothers hovering beside them and the fluttering hearts of their unborn babes to the fears they carry:

I reach up, enfold her hands.

I too had to learn that my body was mine.

And then a sharp one-movement poem, as Davis becomes the patient. Now Davis learns another level of loving. In her deepest pain, she understands gender:

How necessary both -

The tender gentle sympathy

and at other times

The strength and deference

that lifted and held and did not let me fall.

We witness the beloved care of the nurses, in juxtaposition to the teaching residents, each one smacking the hand sanitation device, as they abandon her.

I’m not sure Davis learns to overcome the fears she finds in her patients. But it is in her poetry that she can comfort them, herself and us. In “On Call: Splenectomy,” she writes:

I’ve taken Pity on you

left out the really awful part . . .

And these stories

How I tame them on the page.

These are Davis’s gifts, the stories that she has plucked from her life’s work. Now, in these terrible frightening times, we draw comfort from Davis’s poems, knowing she has received us. She has heard our stories and our cries, returned them to us, wrapping her words to in poems.

Here they belong to you, she seems to say. We receive them with gratitude.—Muriel A. Murch

Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner, is the author of Taking Care of Time, winner of the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize (Michigan State University Press, 2018). Her poems "Entering the Sick Room" and "It Was the Second Patient of the Day,"appear in the Fall 2018 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Learn more about her work at cortneydavis.com

Photo by Jon Gordon.

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Muriel A. Murch was born and grew up England, graduating as a nurse in 1964. In 1965 she married Walter Murch in New York City, and they motorcycled to Los Angeles, relocating to the Bay Area in 1968. Murch has a BSN from San Francisco State in 1991, completing her book, Journey in the Middle of the Road, One Woman's Journey through a Mid-Life Education (Sybil Press 1995). Her short stories and poetry are included in several journals, including most recently, Stories of Illness and Healing, Women Write Their Bodies (Kent State University Press 2007); The Bell Lap Stories for Compassionate Nursing Care (CRC press, Taylor and Francis 2016); and This Blessed Field: How Nursing School Shaped Our Lives and Careers (Kent State University Press 2018). Her work is included in the anthology Learning to Heal, Reflections on Nursing School (Kent State University 2018). Discover more about her work at murielmurch.com.

Avalanche

Julia Leigh’s Avalanche, a story of the writer’s devastating desire and struggle to conceive a child, is a slender memoir. However, the pages are richly packed with the details of her private hell as she spirals through cycle after cycle of in vitro fertilization. The challenge of reading this book, though, is a worthwhile one.  It is difficult to witness someone’s pain so intensely, but it is also an honor.

What Leigh exposes in her writing isn’t just the inner workings of our infertility zeitgeist, with all of its statistics, though the numbers are bleaker than the media would generally have us believe.  She makes tangible the emotional and psychological turmoil that those numbers create in patients who will cling to any sign of hope.  “In the last year, what percentage of women my age at the clinic had taken home a baby using their own eggs?” she asks.  “[The doctor’s] answer: 2.8 percent for 44-year-olds, 6.6 percent for 43-year-olds…What to do?  What to do?  Where does this stop?” 

 The heart of this book beats with raw honesty. Leigh’s acknowledgement, for instance, of putting her career before her desire to start a family: “I also said—it pains me now—that I needed to safeguard ‘my hard-won creative life.’  Why was I so quick to add any sort of caveat? Why did I set the two ways of being—motherhood, writing—at odds?” And of course, the sad, perhaps humiliating reckoning with the biological reality of her age: “When I reported back to my sister she frowned and said… ‘I hate to say it but the main thing is the age of your eggs so any extra hope is marginal.’”

 Avalanche is not a traditional a memoir filled with scenes and stories.   Leigh isn’t concerned with writing workshop rhetoric here, which means less time spent on the areas where most writers are told to focus: developing characters and settings and showing not telling.  She’s concerned with telling her truth. Her story is internal, psychological.  Of course there are external factors—her marriage and divorce, her career—but ultimately, the story moves away from these forces and becomes an all-consuming individual quest.  Less a book, more an extended essay of sorts, Avalanche isn’t divided into chapters.  It reads like a wistful film, perhaps a result of Leigh’s experience in script-writing, and it feels intentionally written to be read and digested in one sitting. 

The prevalence of fertility treatments in our world deems this book timely, but at its core, this is not a story of fad medical treatments or the contemporary female plight.  “What I try to hold onto,” she writes at the end of her journey, “is a commitment to love widely and intensely.  Tenderly.  In ways I would not have previously expected…After the avalanche, the bare face of the mountain.  Under the sun and the moon.”  Leigh’s story, while deeply personal and specific, strikes a far more universal chord: the desire to love, and to be loved, unconditionally; to find beauty and satisfaction in unexpected places; and to gracefully accept our individual narratives, even if they don’t play out the way we hoped or imagined them. —Holly Schechter

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HOLLY SCHECHTER teaches English and Writing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. She graduated from McGill University with a degree in English Literature, and holds an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is active at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where she received excellent care as a patient, and in turn serves on the Friends of Mount Sinai Board and fundraises for spine research. Her piece "Genealogy" appeared in the Fall 2014 Intima.

The Heart

The Heart by French writer Maylis De Kerangal is exactly what it says it is: a dive into the multitude of lives that surround an organ donation. Unflinching and stark, this novel takes its readers into every crevice of the process of donation. We travel down each vein, into the inner depths of the many lives that will be changed by this experience.

De Kerangal’s novel is clear in its support of organ donation, but simultaneously opposes our culture’s narrative of this procedure. Rather than showing the miracle of a donation, the readers are first shown the torturous decision-making process. We see the protagonist, Simon, in his brutal accident. We are shown another character, Thomas Remige, as he confronts his role as a clinician—he must be compassionate, yet objective, and convince the family without any form of persuasion. Time bends as we follow Thomas’s storyline. We are shown the exacting time limitations for the immediate needs of others, but also the necessary, deliberate slowing of time for the grieving family. While the benefits and decisions about the organ’s next move are instantaneous, the family’s time almost stops completely. Thomas is acutely aware of the memories that will be associated with the decision and the months and years that will impact the family’s choices, and he has no intention of making the family feel coerced into donating Simon’s organs through a rushed conversation.

In this way, De Kerangal’s depiction of the family perspective is brutally honest and open in every form. However, the family’s journey to making this crucial decision about donation respectfully encompasses their grief and their need for a simultaneous closure and continuation of life. We see the way their family is sewn together through the wreckage of tragedy. Not only does De Kerangal describe the emotional effects of organ donation, but she also brings a level of clarity to the physical act of harvesting organs.

Maylis De Kerangal

That kind of examination allows the reader to shift from one space to another almost seamlessly, from the slow, muddled process of a family grieving and Thomas’s instantaneous and urgent messaging to the factual, the sterile, and the professional removal process. Combining these opposing attitudes and realities about organ donation immerses the reader into this messy and irreverent space. She has captured the essence of humanity and of the continuation of life within the death of this young man.

 In the end, the author moves the reader poetically and seamlessly into a new space—one of sacred mourning that once again underscores the sacrifice. The author completely turns the ancient practice of heart-burial on its head, revealing a modernized perspective that simultaneously saves lives and gives the highest respect to the dead. Rather than keeping the heart separately interred in a place of worship, the heart is now "interred" in the most sacred space it can be given: another person's body. The heart’s consciousness and soul are symbolically kept safe and "live on" and in this way, De Kerangal takes a practice that may seem unnatural to some and puts it in line with revered practices, reserved only for kings and poets.

The Heart is a perspective-changing experience. De Kerangal transports us to the depths of grief, situating us elbow deep in the bloody body of a teenager, and then brings us up to the stars, to the heavens, and ultimately to the frailty and beauty of life and death--Katelyn Connor

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Katelyn Connor is a National Sales Associate at Penguin Random House. She completed her degree in Narrative Medicine in May, 2016.

When Breath Becomes Air

It is often startling and unsettling to read the work of a writer who has passed.  In some ways, this is the norm—it’s rare that students in school read books by writers still alive.  The distinction, however, is this: those writers—Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, even Salinger, who only passed a few years ago—aren’t writing about their descent into death as they lived it.  Paul Kalinthi’s When Breath Becomes Air details the last year of his life as he, a neurosurgeon, fights metastatic lung cancer.  It sounds depressing in summary, though the book lacks any trace of self-pity or of anger.  It is written with intelligence and with honesty, a product of reflection and insight.  We can trust him, the reader knows, to present his story to us the same way we could have trusted him to operate on our brains.  His humanity is tangible. 

The most striking observation about the book is its voice.  Despite his death last year, Kalinthi’s voice is rich and alive on the page, and he speaks not to doctors or to cancer patients but to anyone who is interested in the question of what it means to live and to die with humanity.  Kalinthi spent his life devoted to this question, always torn between a career in the humanities and one in medicine.  He ultimately pursued both, first a Master’s degree in literature and then medical school for neurosurgery.  “The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness,” he explains about neurosurgery. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

In the book’s introduction, Abraham Verghese makes note of Kalinthi’s “prophet’s beard,” an idea his wife Lucy later clarifies as an “I didn’t have time to shave” beard—but to readers of his book, it’s clear that Kalinthi was, in fact, a prophet in many ways.  His observation that “life isn’t about avoiding suffering,” which he acknowledges in his and Lucy’s decision to have a child despite his prognosis, demonstrates the ways he understands the world beyond his own life. Experiencing illness as a doctor—and a sensitive, empathetic one—adds a moral gravity to his words.

The Kalinthi family: Paul, Lucy, and baby Cady

Paul Kalinthi passed away surrounded by his family when his daughter Cady was eight months old.  “When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself,” he tells his daughter in the final paragraph, “provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.  In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”  His life was cut too short, though his extraordinary accomplishments in his thirty-seven years might make you reevaluate how you’ve spent your time, what you’ve taken for granted, and how to leave an imprint as large as his.  —Holly Schechter

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HOLLY SCHECHTER teaches English and Writing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. She graduated from McGill University with a degree in English Literature, and holds an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is active at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where she received excellent care as a patient, and in turn serves on the Friends of Mount Sinai Board and fundraises for spine research. Her piece "Genealogy" appeared in the Fall 2014 Intima.

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients' Lives by Theresa Brown, RN

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The Shift follows Theresa Brown through a twelve hour shift at the urban teaching hospital where she works as a registered nurse.  Brown’s thoughtful and insightful observations provide an inside look at the challenges of nursing on an oncology unit, as she takes care of patients like frail Mr. Hampton, whose cutting-edge treatment may kill him, and anxious Candace, awaiting a stem cell transplant. 

This nonfiction narrative goes into great depth and detail about hospital routine and the stress it puts on patients, nurses and doctors.  The book is also, surprisingly, filled with literary references, from writers as varied as William Blake, Abraham Verghese, and Rudyard Kipling.  Brown, a former English professor who writes an occasional column on nursing issues for The New York Times, deftly inserts these to lend meaning to certain poignant moments, such as when she likens William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” to a favorite patient’s candy dish, each capable of teaching us something about what is important in life.

The pace of the book allows for these detours, as well as detours into some of Brown’s memories, worries and fears.  But what comes through most clearly are the empathy and compassion she feels for her patients, as she searches for an understanding of the meaning of health, illness and caring.  Brown laments the way things used to be, while simultaneously accepting how much they have changed.  A cancer diagnosis is no longer the death sentence it once was for the patients we encounter in The Shift, yet Brown must still help patients face the end of their lives, her most challenging yet ultimately most rewarding task. 

To Brown, nursing is like “putting your shoulder to a rock and pushing it uphill.”  Throughout the book she keeps the reader turning the pages with the possibility that at any time the rock might slip and roll back down the hill.  During this twelve hour shift, it never does. —Priscilla Mainardi

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Priscilla Mainardi is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University where she received a MFA in creative writing in 2012 while continuing to practice as a registered nurse.  Often awed by her patients’ ability to cope with dire health issues, she is interested in exploring the ways in which narrative can connect caregivers and patients in a stronger bond to foster healing, and in the contributions of nurses to the field of narrative medicine. Her short story, "Pretending Not to Know," appeared in the Spring 2014 Intima. Mainardi joined the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine in Fall 2015.