Showing 71 - 80 of 945 annotations tagged with the keyword "Empathy"

Mandatory Evacuation Zone

Aull, Felice

Last Updated: Jan-02-2018
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

In "Mandatory Evacuation Zone," Felice Aull has gathered 63 beautifully crafted poems in which she examines the intricacies of language and loss, of grief and healing.  Each of the book's five sections considers these themes in slightly different ways, always in language that is understated, vivid, and exact.  In Section I, we read poems that focus on the author's complicated family history and her early loss of homeland.  In "Tracings" (page 15), an unknown relative (thanks to online genealogy searches) reaches the narrator and wants to meet her.  She, however, only wishes to learn ". . . how my parents / and my infant self / made our tortuous way out . . . . " Brought in infancy from Germany to America, the author suffers the loss of both native homeland and native language ("Notes from an Alpine Vacation" page 16).  She searches photos of her mother and ponders museum note cards illustrated by Holocaust survivors ("Museum Notecards" page 18), imagining what she can't quite know and yet can't quite forget.  

Section II finds the narrator as a young woman in American, awakening to sexuality ("Gay Blades," "Camp Counselors Make Out,"  "On the Staircase" pages 29-31), becoming a wife and mother, and then a grandmother.  A grandchild's birth is both joyful and yet another "slipping toward / the edge of separation" ("Daughter in her Eighth Month" page 37). 

In Section III, the author turns her gaze to observations of the world around her, around us, aware of how many come to loss and death.  "Be prepare to mourn," she tells us in "Disaster in October" (page 49), and in the moving poem, "I Saw the Smoke," re-visions September 11th in words stripped of sentimentality and therefore made more powerful. 

Sections IV and V confront bodily loss through aging and illness, noting how, in so many ways, we try both to capture and to let go: "You snap photo upon photo / hoping to grasp and preserve / what cannot be grasped" (Capturing Alaska" page 66).  We learn of the most personal losses in poems of biopsies, surgeries, and chemotherapy.  When facing the unknown, every event might seem to hold a prediction.  In "Stunning Blows," a doorman stuns a mouse, claims that it's dead.  But the narrator, aware of the wages of time, writes, "But I still see it, like death, / moving toward me" (page 81).  At the book's end, we return to language, how it too can leave us ("Forget That" page 90).  Yet in the collection's final, gentle poems, the poet is "able, finally / to walk past the park's redbud tree / without weeping" ("Immunity" page 96).

View full annotation

Hope and Grace: Spiritual Experiences in Severe Distress, Illness, and Dying

Renz, Monika

Last Updated: Dec-14-2017
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Dr. Monika Renz’s work with dying patients is unusual if not unique in the way she appropriates and applies insights from Jungian depth psychology, practices available in patients’ faith traditions, and musically guided meditation to invite and support the spiritual experiences that so often come, bidden or unbidden, near the end of life.  An experienced oncologist, Dr. Renz offers carefully amassed data to support her advocacy of focused practices of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care, but is also quite comfortable with the fact that “neither the frequency nor the visible effects of experiences of the transcendent prove that such experience is an expression of grace” because “unverifiability is intrinsic to grace.”  Still, her long experience leads her to assert not only that “grace” can be a useful, practical, operative word for what professional caregivers may witness and mediate but also that affirmation and support of patients’ spiritual, religious, or transcendent experiences in the course of dying can amplify and multiply moments of grace, which manifest as sudden, deep peace in the very midst of pain, profound acceptance, openness to reconciliations, or significant awakenings from torpor that allow needed moments of closure with loved ones.  Describing herself as “an open-minded religious person and a practicing Christian,” she reminds readers that God is a loanword, whose basic form in Germanic was gaudam, a neutral participle.  Depending on the Indo-Germanic root, the word means “the called upon” or “the one sacrificed to . . . .”  Openness to the divine in both patients and caregivers, Dr. Renz argues, can and does make end-of-life care a shared journey of discovery and offer everyone involved a valuable reminder that medicine is practiced, always, at the threshold of mystery.

View full annotation

Second Bloom

Krugovoy Silver, Anya

Last Updated: Dec-05-2017
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

These poems are not a cancer chronicle, but the experience of living with cancer is threaded through them in a way that illustrates beautifully how awareness of illness may permeate daily life, but is foregrounded and backgrounded, reshaped and revisited in shifting ways as it takes its course.  They encompass moments in family life, moments in the hospital, moments of spiritual longing and awareness of loss.  Together they offer a record of accommodation, acclimation, and complex acceptance.

View full annotation

Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon

Marsh, Henry

Last Updated: Nov-28-2017
Annotated by:
Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

In this follow-up to his masterful memoir Do No Harm, British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must deal with old age and retirement after nearly four decades as a doctor. Stepping down engenders mixed feelings, and he confesses to "longing to retire, to escape all the human misery that I have had to witness for so many years, and yet dreading my departure as well" (p17).

Marsh keeps busy by spending time in Nepal training young doctors and operating. He also makes visits to the Ukraine to perform surgery and teach. He has a fondness for creating things and purchases a fixer upper cottage that he struggles to repair. Marsh recounts previous neurosurgical cases, mostly patients with brain tumors. He remembers the distress at being sued by patients. He reveals his own admission to a psychiatric hospital as a young man. Regrets, both personal and professional, are confessed.

View full annotation

Taking Turns, Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371

Czerwiec, MK

Last Updated: Nov-13-2017
Annotated by:
Natter, Michael

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Novel

Summary:

Taking Turns, Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371, is a graphic novel written and illustrated by nurse and artist, MK Czerwiec. In it, she details what it was like to be a nurse during the AIDs epidemic in Chicago in the 1990s. The book, however, is much more than a story about AIDS care during that time. Czerweic tackles patient/provider relationships, boundaries, hospital struggles, the role of art in medicine and healing, but most profoundly: death and dying. 

View full annotation

This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine

Chin, Eliza Lo

Last Updated: Nov-09-2017
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

This Side of Doctoring is an anthology published in 2002 about the experiences of women in medicine. While the essays span multiple centuries, most are from the past 50 years. They reflect on a multitude of stages in the authors’ personal and professional lives. In 344 pages divided into twelve sections, including "Early Pioneers," "Life in the Trenches," and "Mothering and Doctoring," the 146 authors recount - in excerpts from published memoirs, previously published and unpublished essays, poems and other writings, many of them composed solely for this collection - what it was then and what it was in 2002 to be a woman becoming a doctor in the U.S.. All but a handful of the authors are physicians or surgeons. There is a heavy representation from institutions on both coasts, especially the Northeast. Four men were invited to reflect on being married to physician wives. There is one anonymous essay concerning sexual harassment and a final essay from a mother and daughter, both physicians.   Beginning with the first American female physicians in the mid-19th century, like historic ground-breakers Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Putnam Jacobi, the anthology proceeds through the phases of medical school, residency, early and mid-careers, up to reflections from older physicians on a life spent in medicine. Many of the authors have names well known in the medical humanities, including Marcia Angell, Leon Eisenberg, Perri Klass, Danielle Ofri, Audrey Shafer, and Marjorie Spurrier Sirridge, to mention a few. 

The essays and poems and letters have, as a partial listing, the following subjects: family influences in becoming a physician; professional friendships; marriage; children and their impact on a woman’s career in medicine; the decision not to have children; ill family members; illness as a physician; establishing one's sexuality as a physician; struggles with male physicians and their egos; mentors, both female and male; memorable patients (often terminal or dying); the life of a wife-physician, or mother-physician; the guilt and sacrifice that accompany such a dual life; the importance - and easy loss - of personal time or what internist Catherine Chang calls “self-care” (page 334).   The anthology also touches on how women have changed the practice of medicine in various ways, prompted by the growing realization, as family practice physician Alison Moll puts it, "that I didn't have to practice in the traditional way" (page 185)  The authors write about the wisdom of setting limits; training or working part-time or sharing a position with another woman; and the constant face-off with decisions, especially those not normally confronting an American man becoming a doctor. 
One conclusion is evident before the reader is halfway through the book: there are many approaches to becoming a fulfilled female physician including finding one’s identity in the field.  Implicit in most of the essays and writings is the lament from obstetrician-gynecologist Gayle Shore Mayer: "Where is the self ? There are pieces of me everywhere", (page 275) recalling a similar cry from Virginia Woolf's Orlando, another essentially female soul trying to find what Richard Selzer has called "The Exact Location of the Soul".  Several authors discover that female physicians have unique gifts to offer their patients. As internist Rebekah Wang-Cheng writes, “I am a better physician because I am a mother, and I know because of my experiences as a physician that I am a better mother.” (page 151) 

There are sections at the end devoted to a glossary for the lay reader, resources for women (as of 2002), and generous notes about the contributors (which section also serves as a useful index of each's contributions).

View full annotation

The Beautician

Gunn, Thom

Last Updated: Nov-06-2017
Annotated by:
Ratzan, Richard M.

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

Summary:

"Beautician" is a short poem about a beautician visiting a dead friend in the morgue, her sorrow at seeing her friend dead and not looking her best, even dead, and the beautician's attempts to rectify the situation. It is fifteen lines long, in three stanzas of five lines each, in iambic pentameter with a rhyming pattern of abbab. The rhyming is best described as approximate, e.g., "skill" with "beautiful" with "all".

View full annotation

Eros and Illness

Morris, David

Last Updated: Oct-31-2017
Annotated by:
McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Several threads tie together this ambitious, beautifully digressive reflection on eros and logos in the experience of illness and the conduct of medicine and health care, which takes into account what a complex striation of cultural legacies, social and political pressures, and beliefs go into both.  Framing his reflections on the role of unknowing, altered states, inexplicable events, desire, hope, love, and mystery in illness and healing is a fragmented, poignant narrative of Morris’s own experience of watching his wife succumb to the ravages of early Alzheimer’s. 

Her disease is one that leads both professional and intimate caregivers to the same question:  what do you do when there’s nothing left for scientific medicine to do?  Conversations about palliative care are broadening, he points out, and medical education is making more room for the kind of reflection the arts invite and for spirituality as a dimension of illness experience and caregiving.  Guidance in such explorations can be found in ancient literature, especially in the archetypes provided by the Greek and Roman myths.  Morris makes astute and helpful use of his own considerable training in literary studies to provide examples of how eros and logos—complementary contraries—have been conceived and embodied in a somewhat polarized culture and how incomplete health care is when it doesn’t foster the capacity to dwell in and with unknowing, possibility, indeterminacy, and mystery.  Knowing the limits of scientific medicine may, paradoxically, make it better.  Certainly it can help keep our engagements with illness—always relational, always disruptive, most often to some degree bewildering—humane.



View full annotation

No Apparent Distress: A Doctor's Coming-of-Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine

Pearson, Rachel

Last Updated: Oct-19-2017
Annotated by:
Carter, III, Albert Howard

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

This engaging memoir describes Pearson's medical training at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) on Galveston Island from 2009 to 2016. During these years her personal values become clear, and she finds fault in her training, in medicine as practiced in Texas, and even in her own errors in treating patients.

Having left a graduate writing program, Pearson took a "postbac," a year of pre-med courses in Portland, Oregon. She interviewed at medical schools "all over the country" and writes satirically about them; she concludes "nothing out of Texas felt quite right," having lived there and done her undergraduate work at University of Texas at Austin. She's a Spanish speaker with a working-class background. When her classmates provide the annual “white-trash”-themed party, she wonders, “do I go as myself?” (p. 21).

Pearson's education continues on three tracks: the formal UTMB courses in medicine, a simultaneous Ph.D. program at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas, and her volunteer work at the St. Vincent's Student Run Free Clinic. The Ph.D. program is off-stage, not mentioned, but the St. Vincent's Clinic becomes pivotal to her development as a doctor and a moral person.

As for medical school, she finds the relentless "truths of biochemistry and anatomy" so reductive that the suffering of people and surrounding politics seem "not to matter at all" (p. 70). Among the politics are: the lack of safety nets for poor people, the use of uninsured (including prisoners) for students to practice on, failures to extend Medicare, pollution (notably from the oil industry), losses of charitable care, and income disparities that include crushing poverty for many. Something of a rebel, she writes that medical school "felt like junior high" (p. 44). She does enjoy the "clinical encounters" with real patients.

St. Vincent's, by contrast, was “a relief.” Her pages sparkle with her conversation with clinic patients, some homeless, all poor, and all suffering. She reports--confesses, she even says--her errors that had consequences for patients. She writes that errors are an unavoidable part of medical education, but that it's wrong that they should routinely happen to the poorest members of society.  

Chapter 8 discusses depression, which she felt after the second year. She writes about high rates of suicide among medical students and doctors; indeed a close friend killed himself during the "post-doc" year. Because some states require doctors to report psychiatric care, some doctors avoid such care. This consequence “drives a suicide-prone population away from the help we may need" (p.92).

The last two years are the rotations through specialties: surgery, dermatology, trauma, rural medicine, neurology, internal medicine, and so on. These are clearly and insightfully described. In one case (internal medicine), she allows the reader to see the irony of a doctor providing hair removal by laser, diet foods, and Botox treatment for wrinkles, “a pure luxury transaction” (p. 183).

Pearson describes the storms, hurricanes, and floods that hit Galveston Island, also the pollution from the oil industry that causes a “cancer belt” along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts (p. 104). At last she finishes her program, understanding that her identity is simultaneously a person, a physician, and a writer (p. 248). 

View full annotation

The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review

Ofri, D., et al., eds.

Last Updated: Sep-08-2017
Annotated by:
Aull, Felice

Primary Category: Literature / Literature

Genre: Anthology (Mixed Genres)

Summary:

This anthology of poems, short stories, and essays derives from the literary magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, which began publication in 2001. The editor of the magazine and her staff have selected what they consider to be the best literary pieces from the Review's first 6-7 years of publication. Like its parent magazine, the anthology focuses on work that addresses the illness experience, health, healing, and the experiences of health care professionals and other caregivers. The anthology is divided into three parts, each of which has several subsections. Part I, "Initiation," looks at patients' introduction to illness and introduction of doctors to medical education and medical practice. Part II, "Conflict: Grappling with Illness," divides into sections on disability, coping, madness, connections, and family. Part III: "Denouement," addresses mortality, death, loss, and aftermath.

Among the 81 authors represented, seven are physicians, and another half dozen or so are in other caregiving professions such as nursing, social work, counseling. Some writers are well recognized in the literary world (for example James Tate, Amy Hempel, Alicia Ostriker, Rachel Hadas, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Floyd Skloot, Julia Alvarez, David Lehman, Rafael Campo, and Abraham Verghese -- the latter two are physicians); most of the less well-known others have published in a variety of venues.

View full annotation