I’m writing in response to Danielle Snyderman’s Field Notes essay “Not Yet, The Epilogue” (Spring 2021 Intima). I wrote the poem “The Trail to Ahous Bay” to read aloud to my friend Joan Bodger. She was in the palliative care unit of Tofino Hospital on Vancouver Island. I had come from Toronto to visit with her, and to say goodbye. I was staying on Vargas Island, a short boat ride from Tofino, and had taken the cross-island hike that became the poem.
I think about time a lot now. My days are ruled by schedules and cases and meetings, and I spend much of my day reacting to the pressures of the unrelenting sweep of the second hand as it moves around turning into minutes and hours, never slow enough for me to accomplish everything I need to do.
An internist reflects on his short story as well as a fellow physician’s personal essay and explores the complex issue of crossing implicit social boundaries in the clinician-patient relationship.
A retired gynecologic oncologist reflects on her own career and realizes how watercolor artwork can allow for even healthcare providers to be seen.
As I was creating Hal Winters, the character at the center of my short story, “Old Scrubs,” (Spring 2024 Intima) I imagined a rumpled, gray-haired, and unflappable older male surgeon who has seen it all. He heads to the hospital every day, goes through the motions and gets his work done without fanfare or fireworks. He hasn’t felt the spark of “why” he went into medicine for years but, as long as he remembers the “how,” he will keep plowing the same furrow.
I work at a community clinic with patients who are homeless–there is the stigma of homelessness, and then there is the stigma of looking homeless.
Some patients of mine do not–or do not yet– appear unhoused. It is usually those who still have family that support them, who live in a car, who hold a job—running food for Doordash, picking for Amazon, sitting security—or who have not been homeless for so very long. But many of my patients do appear frankly homeless: a shuffling gait, a blanket draped around their shoulders, belongings pushed in a stroller, blackened teeth, leg wounds.
When I read “All Tuned Up” by Albert Howard Carter III (Spring 2021 Intima), I remembered a pediatric intensive care unit patient from my own 1980’s residency experience. In Carter’s poem, a medical resident presents a case during mortality and morbidity rounds. The resident is moved to tears as he tells the gathered audience about the death of a patient he knew well. A senior doctor “gently” offers context and says, “Maybe he was just tired.”
Mercifully, I’ve muffled memories from some of the deaths during my residency training in the pediatric intensive care unit. But I remember a slight girl of about sixteen with silky, wavy hair, lying in a metal-frame bed parallel to the wall against the window, in silhouette.
In this reflection, a retired surgeon examines the research findings of evidence-based medicine to uncover whether empathy, in addition to the principles and practice of narrative medicine, can facilitate deeper healing.
Fiction and visual art are a natural pairing, one digging deep through words, the other a profound visual exploration. Both genres allow ways to explore the issue of mental health.
“Every thought begins with I. This is happening to him, I try to say,
not happening to me. But it is, too. This is my place to tell it.”
The above is an excerpt from Kristin Camitta Zimet’s “A Dialysis Diary,” (Intima, Fall 2023). In this beautiful essay, Camitta Zimet writes about her husband’s end-stage kidney disease, the initiation of dialysis, and the impact that his chronic condition and the treatment it required had both on her and her relationship.