LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

The Pull of the Stars

Donoghue, Emma

Last Updated: May-02-2023

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

It is Dublin in late autumn 1918, the waning days of World War I, and nurse-midwife Julia Power is suddenly thrust into the task of managing a small ward of heavily pregnant women who have contracted the deadly influenza. Having survived influenza herself, she does not fear infection, but she worries about her lack of experience. She also worries about her shell-shocked brother with whom she shares a home.

Two people appear to help: the intelligent but uneducated young volunteer Bridie Sweeney raised in an institution; and the legendary woman doctor Kathleen Lynn –who quietly reveals her competence and skill, even as authorities are lurking to arrest her.

Over the course of just a few days, they encounter recalcitrant mothers, complicated deliveries, battered wives, stillbirths, and deaths. Influenza adds special dangers to the natural event, but some patients survive their ordeal.

Although Bridie was to help for just one day, she learns quickly and returns. Julia is impressed by her diligence and drawn ever closer to her kindness and earthy wisdom. They pass a night together sharing confidences, and Julia begins to understand the physical and emotional mistreatment that Bridie suffered in the care of nuns. Their embrace awakens in Julia a yearning she had never imagined. But only hours later Bridie falls ill and succumbs rapidly to the deadly infection.

When an unwed mother suddenly dies after giving birth to a deformed child, Julia is horrified that the baby must be placed in an institution. Instead, she takes the baby home to an uncertain future but sparing the child the same horrors that Bridie once suffered.

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Two Nurses, Smoking

Means, David

Last Updated: Jul-20-2022

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

Two nurses decked in scrubs repeatedly meet outdoors for smoking breaks and banter during the summer and fall months. Gracie, a thin and pale woman, leads an itinerant life as she follows a mobile lithotripsy unit that services "cut-rate hospitals" in New York. She assists with the machine (dubbed "the kidney pounder") that delivers ultrasound energy to smash kidney stones. Marlon, a brawny man and Army vet adorned with a scar on his neck and an arm tattoo, works in the ER at one of the modest hospitals visited by the lithotripsy trailer.

The duo exchange numerous stories about patients they have cared for and eventually details about their own private life including personal hardships. A bond develops and deepens between these two people who "were both damaged, somehow lost" (p50). Their growing relationship is accompanied by physical attraction and culminates later in a night of love-making followed by mutual weeping.

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My Borrowed Face

Nigliazzo, Stacy

Last Updated: Jun-06-2022

Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

"My Borrowed Face," Stacy Nigliazzo's third full-length poetry collection, contains 55 poems, presented as a continuous flow without division into sections. Once again, Nigliazzo's poems are spare, often only phrases or words scattered on the white page, a form that leads the reader's eye from one image to the next. (For a brief discussion of how this poet uses white space, see the annotation of her second collection, “Sky the Oar” on this database.) The poems in this collection were written during the Covid pandemic; they speak of the toll the virus has taken and continues to take not only on patients but, in these poems, on the caregivers--specifically the poet. Nigliazzo, an emergency room nurse who has worked through five pandemic surges, is the perfect narrator to take us along on her rounds.

The book's early poems look back before the pandemic ("5920 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 11) and then they come closer ("30 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 12), until they begin to chart, with stark imagery, the beginning and the continuation of the pandemic. We walk with the poet / nurse as she ticks off the days from "First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic," p. 15, through "575 Days Out," p. 41.

The 16 poems that close the book are a rest, in a sense, from the pandemic. These poems are individual reflections, like quick photographs, that capture a variety of observations both personal and professional. "Self-Portrait as the Pink Moon," p. 42, and "Blue Book," p. 43, hark back first to Nigliazzo's mother, pregnant with the poet, then to her mother's death. In a way, circling this collection back to the beginning, birth and death, the never ending turning.

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Daughter

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-17-2022

Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Davis, a nurse practitioner, chronicles her daughter’s life, illness and death at age 54 from cancer. The book consists of three sections, with poems unevenly divided such that of the 30 poems, only one rests in section II. Titled Windmill, this poem forms a fulcrum between the relationship of mother and daughter to one of mother and ill daughter. The windmill is a small gift from her daughter – a reminder of Kansas where the daughter, her husband and children live, thousands of miles from Davis. The collection begins with her ‘soon-to-be born daughter’ (page 15) and ends with The Sacrament of Time, dated months before her daughter’s death from, at this point, a widely metastatic breast cancer. The final poem holds within it an entire world – the birth of the daughter, the fraught frantic mother-to-be pleading for help, the birth of a healthy baby girl, the wonder of the new addition to their family, the travel with the newborn to home, and a reflection on what poems can and cannot do. “Poems cannot // save us, Amichai said, but all I have are these poems” (page 58).

If the first section details the many ways unconditional love for a child unfolds, through wonders of babyhood, delights of childhood, the harsh lessons of adolescence, and the successful launch, the final section underscores how deep that love runs. As the cancer illness progressed during the pandemic, issues of separation became more acute. Davis marks the numbers affected (illness and death) by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) during the pandemic, as her poems follow her daughter’s cancer. These numbers, along with brief quotations from her daughter’s scans and reports, lend a contrast to the evocative imagery and experience of illness in a loved one. Medical mistakes are chronicled as well (see What a Terrible Mistake).

The collection is dedicated to Davis’ daughter and her daughter’s children. Even the title, Daughter, calls to her, as if addressing her daughter directly. The title also serves to universalize the parenting of a daughter, even as the particulars of this family are detailed.

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Queen of the Sugarhouse

Studer, Constance

Last Updated: Sep-14-2021

Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

Constance Studer's engaging "Queen of the Sugarhouse" contains nine short stories ranging in length from 9 to 21 pages, each story complete in itself. Her nursing expertise is evident in several stories, including "Mercy" (page 3), "Shift" (page 77), "The Isolation Room" (page 95), "Testament" (page 112), "Special Needs" (page 122), and the title story, "Queen of the Sugarhouse" (page 138).

While many of the stories specifically revolve around medicine or nursing, others examine a variety of issues, often with healthcare peripherally involved.

In "Shelter" (page 21), a homeless vet who served in the Gulf War struggles with PTSD, the difficulty of obtaining permanent disability, the inability to find work or a suitable living space, and his quest to find treatment for his many physical problems after chemical exposure during Desert Storm. He sees a different doctor at each appointment and no one truly helps him. "Finding today's meal or bed or beer takes all my energy, leaving me nothing left over for thinking about next week. I am a veteran and can no longer vote because I have no home" (page 27). Studer takes us into this man's life and struggles with clarity and empathy.

"Think Beauty" (page 37) questions what makes a woman beautiful (or believe she is beautiful) against a back story examining friendship and all that entails. "This Middle Kingdom" (page 58) tells a story that encompasses both the heroics of a ski team that saves skiers in distress and how difficult it can be to feel compassion for those who end up in trouble because they flaunt the rules or advice of the experts--a theme quite relevant for our times.

The book's opening story, "Mercy" (page 3) explores a nurse's various reactions after she makes an error while dispensing medication. As in every story in the collection, multiple themes weave in and out, driven by a character's decision or dilemma. In "Mercy," we see how medical personnel can truly care for and worry about their patients; how even a small error may cause a nurse deep distress, both for her patient and for her future; how the nursing shortage leads to burnout; and how "real life" continues on in the background, in this case, a passionate love affair that leads both to marriage and to grief. "Grief is a train that doesn't run on anyone else's schedule" (page 15).

"Shift" (page 76) tells of a physician who is devoted to his work and his patients in the ER ("His white coat flaps, stethoscope bounces as the doctor runs, its weight a comfort, like a rosary for a priest" page 76) while his wife feels neglected. The story moves between the chaos of the ER and the story of his marriage, a love that began when the doctor was in medical school. After his wife leaves him, the doctor sleeps with the lights on, hoping she will return. But whenever he closes his eyes, he only sees scenes from the ER. The story ends with words the doctor has said so often to a patient: "Please sir, lie still. I'm going to numb you now. Hang on, man. Soon the pain will be gone" (page 93).

"The Isolation Room" (page 94) follows a woman, a writer, who has been, she believes, placed unnecessarily and mistakenly in a psychiatric ward. As we read, we wonder if this woman is truly afflicted with a mental disorder or if she is simply extremely imaginative, perhaps betrayed by her husband who arranged for her admission. The main character is likeable, often seemingly sensible, perhaps incredibly but differently talented: "Maybe to be out of her mind meant she'd finally make the leap from logical to intuitive, into her true skin, a room all her own ... a writer, that teller of lies, pursuer of truth by means other than logical, that follower of breadcrumbs through the scary forest wherever they lead?" (page 97).

"Testament" (page 112) follows a student nurse in her first month of training and touches on the care of difficult patients, their various religious beliefs, and how healthcare providers' families are not immune to illness. "Special Needs" (page 121) follows Maria, a waitress with an unexpected pregnancy and wheelchair confined brother. The title story, "Queen of the Sugarhouse" (page 137) is a poignant examination of breast cancer; the terrible trial of chemo and radiation; the complex relationship between the suffering mother and her daughter, a nurse; and how life changes when the drama of uneasy but genuine love and relationship ends. "I think I hear Mama's voice, then realize it's only the sound of water over rocks. Tears are this river carrying me forward" (page 153).

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Face Time

Moore, Lorrie

Last Updated: Oct-28-2020

Galbo, MA, MILS, Sebastian

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

In the lonely glow of her computer, Lorrie Moore’s protagonist FaceTimes her father, who is quarantined in a hospital after contracting the COVID-19 virus following hip surgery. She explains to him the circumstances of the pandemic and names the celebrities and political personages who have tested positive for the virus. Befuddled by hydroxychloroquine, her father passes in and out of hallucination and lucid conversation but jokes when he can despite the side-effects of the “bullshit malaria drugs.” The counterpoint to her sadness for her father is revulsion for the “ghastly” new rituals and habits of indefinite quarantine—the performative antics of Zoom concerts, YouTube binges, bizarre insurance commercials, Bible readings, and social distancing. She is appalled, too, by “well-to-do white families in large suburban homes” that claim “the pandemic for themselves,” families that sanitize grocery bags and order from Amazon and Grubhub. Intermingled with the numbing ennui of quarantine is disgust for the consumerism that thoughtlessly implicates human life, the front-line workers who make these convenient services possible. The protagonist and her sisters coax the hospital staff to comfort their father, play his requested Brahms symphony (any one of the four will do), and give him lemonade, but the “visored hazmatted nurses dressed like beekeepers” are overwhelmed and appear unapproachable, even threatening.

These FaceTime calls become increasingly bewildering to the father. The protagonist’s sister invites her to join a disjointed three-way FaceTime, but the call is interrupted by one of the father’s hydroxychloroquine-induced hallucinations. With “a howl of anguish” and “grimace with agony and sorrow,” he utters German expressions recalled from his war days. The protagonist realizes that her father is “imagining he was a prisoner of war; that was what it must have felt to him—the cruel isolation, the medicine, the lights, the strange machines all around him.” Like the ebbing signal of a satellite in some faraway orbit, contact with her father grows tenuous. For the next FaceTime call, a nurse says her father is asleep. The following day, she waits again for a scheduled FaceTime chat. She phones the hospital to inquire about her father’s missed call but is put on hold, then disconnected. Later, at midnight, the hospital calls to inform her that her father has died.

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I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New and Collected

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jul-24-2020

Donley, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Cortney Davis has divided this collection of her poetry into seven major sections which she calls “Voices.” The first and last sections are “Voices of Healing” which frame and wrap around the others: “Home,” “Desire,” “Suffering,” “Faith,” and “Letting Go and Holding On.” The sections include previously published poems as well as new ones. Davis is known for her ability to see and understand what is going on and to express that in ways that help the reader “get it.” This collection also shows her ability to hear the unique voices that express suffering, faith, desire—and to convey empathic understanding of the speaker. Sometimes she gets angry with the speaker. The poems range through time, from her childhood, nursing training, nursing experiences, deaths of her parents, to more current experiences with grandchildren. Throughout there is a consistent caring and compassion, mixed with many other feelings, many of them contradictory.

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5B

Haggis, Paul; Krauss, Dan

Last Updated: Apr-17-2020

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

5B is a documentary about the special unit created at San Francisco General Hospital (Ward 5B) in 1983 to take care of people with AIDS. Three years later, it moved to the larger Ward 5A, where it remained in operation until 2003 after the introduction of treatments effective enough to drastically reduce the demand for hospitalization and standards of care for AIDS patients were in place throughout the hospital. The documentary covers the medical, social, and political considerations surrounding the opening of Ward 5B, and the AIDS epidemic during that time.

The story is told from various perspectives through interviews with key figures in its development and operation, and archival footage of the ward and AIDS activism in the community. The most prominent among the key figures is Cliff Morrison, a clinical nurse specialist who spearheaded the idea for the unit and then managed it. Several other nurses who served in staff and supervisory positions are featured. Participating physicians include Paul Volberding, an oncologist at the time who became pivotal in the development of effective HIV treatments, and Julie Gerberding, a physician treating patients on the unit who later became the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Lorraine Day, the chief of orthopedic surgery at the hospital when the unit opened is heard often as an opposing voice. Hank Plante, a local television news reporter also appears frequently to offer his perspectives on many of the social and political issues swirling around the unit. Among other participants are AIDS activists, volunteers, and family members of patients on the unit.

Several storylines frame the documentary including how nurses drove the unit’s inception and then were instrumental in running it. “Nurses were in charge,” said Volberding, admiringly. Interwoven throughout the film are the experiences of the patients and individual nurses, including one nurse who was infected with HIV from a needle stick. “Those nurses were the real heroes,” said one activist.

The unit and those who worked there also encountered opposition from inside the hospital. The nurses of this unit practiced in ways they considered safe but not in such a manner that would preclude them from touching patients or require that they don so much protective gear they become unseeable. Nurses and other clinicians from other parts of the hospital objected and did not want to be compelled to adopt practices they thought endangered them on the occasions they took care of AIDS patients. The film follows this story through union grievances and public debates to their conclusion, which sided with the unit nurses and their advocates.

The story is told against a backdrop of gay rights activism in the 1970s that led to AIDS activism with its influence on how the unit operated. Also getting attention is the fear AIDS struck in society and the resulting social backlash at a time of federal government insouciance. This fear continued up to the time the federal government recognized the epidemic and began taking action, relieving some of the tension but never eliminating it. The documentary ends with key participants reflecting on their experiences with the unit; most were proud, some bitter, and a few a little of both.

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Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine

Moore, Dinty; Murphy, Erin; Nicholson, Renee

Last Updated: Jul-19-2019

Schilling, Carol

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Bodies of Truth gathers twenty-five essays about experiencing illnesses and disabilities from the perspectives of patients, healthcare professionals, and families. These personal stories join the growing company of narratives that reflect on the inner experience of illness or caring for the ill and on the social circumstances that influence those experiences. In addition to the diversity of perspectives, the editors have selected pieces about an exceptionally wide range of health conditions: multiple sclerosis, brain damage, deafness, drug addiction, Down syndrome, pain, cancer, infertility, depression, trauma, HIV, diabetes, food allergies, asthma. They also include essays on the death of a child and an attempted suicide.

The essays resist easy categorization. In their Preface, the editors explain that they took “a more nuanced approach” to organizing the contributions loosely by themes so that they would “speak to each other as much as they speak to readers.” For example, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke’s spirited “Rendered Mute” calls out the OB-GYN who refused to remove his mask during delivery to allow this deaf mother-in-the-making to read his lips to exchange vital communications. Her essay is followed by Michael Bérubé’s “Jamie’s Place.” In it the father recounts the emotionally and logistically complicated path he and his son with Down syndrome navigate as they seek a place for him to live as independently as possible as an adult. This sequence invites readers to listen to two stories about disability from differing parental perspectives and circumstances. But perhaps readers can also to find commonalities in ways social attitudes toward disability fold themselves into the most intimate moments of the families’ lives.

Several of the essays take readers into a professional caregiver’s medical and moral struggles. In “Confession” nurse Diane Kraynak writes sensitively about a newborn in intensive care who distressed her conscience. She was troubled by both the extensive medical interventions he was given “because we can” and their failure to save him. When Matthew S. Smith was an exhausted neurology resident, he ignored a stroke patient who inexplicably handed him a crumpled paper. Scribbled on it was a ragged, ungrammatical, and urgently expressive poem, which he read only years later, admonishing himself “to cherish the moments of practice” that could “change your life forever (“One Little Mind, Our Lie, Dr. Lie”). Madaline Harrison’s “Days of the Giants” recounts “the sometimes brutal initiation” of her early medical training decades ago. Narrating those struggles has led her to “compassion: for my patients, for myself as a young doctor, and for the students and residents coming behind me.”

Overall, the essays range widely across medical encounters. After attending her husband’s death, Meredith Davies Hadaway (“Overtones”) became a Certified Music Practitioner who plays the harp to calm hospice patients. Dr. Taison Bell graciously thanks a pharmacist that he regards as a full partner in his treatment of patients (“A Tribute to the Pharmacist”). Tenley Lozano (“Submerged”), a Coast Guard veteran, was traumatized first by the various abuses of male supervisors, once nearly drowning, and then by her struggle to receive psychiatric care.

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Taking Care of Time

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-02-2019

Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In this volume by the esteemed nurse-poet/writer, Cortney Davis, are 43 previously published poems (some revised for this collection), assembled in 3 sections-- the middle section featuring her long poem, "Becoming the Patient," that recounts through 10 shorter poems her time "in the hospital."

The poems in the surrounding sections describe in beautiful and intimate detail her patients' lives and the call to and practice of nursing. Featured throughout are battles won and lost-- with disease, with the medical staff, and as the title-- taking care of time-- suggests, the finitude we all face. No matter the difficulties of hospital life-- whether as practitioner or patient-- its familiarity provides grounding and comfort in these poems as, for example, heard through the speaker of "First Night at the Cheap Hotel" who tells us:

"Being here is like being sick in a hospital ward
without the lovely, muffling glove of illness.
In hospital, I would be drowsy, drugged into a calm
that accepts the metal door's clang,
the heavy footfall right outside my door.
All these, proof of life,
and there would be a nurse too, holding my wrist,
counting and nodding, only a silhouette in the dark" (p.67)

And if sometimes the experiences and images become too hard to bear, the skillful nurse-poet can, as Cortney Davis does in "On-Call: Splenectomy," "tame them on page” (p.52).

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