Taking Care of Time

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-02-2019

Kohn, Martin

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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A Mind Unraveled: A Memoir

Eichenwald, Kurt

Last Updated: Jan-02-2019

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

Kurt Eichenwald shares his experiences living with epilepsy in an electrifying narrative. Beginning with staring spells as a child and then later on generalized convulsions with loss of consciousness, he experiences as many as 4 seizures a week between the ages of 18 to 30. After that, the seizures become milder and less frequent. Coincidentally, his wife, father, and older brother are physicians and his mother a nurse.

Eichenwald describes his encounters with multiple neurologists, the best of them being Dr. Naarden. Unfortunately, other health professionals are portrayed as incompetent, careless, lacking empathy, or even unscrupulous. Multiple mishaps with prescribed anticonvulsant medications are chronicled – drug side effects, toxic levels of medicines, and a bout of bone marrow suppression. He suffers broken ribs, cuts and wounds, burns, and is even blanketed by deep snow due to seizures.

Eichenwald acknowledges the toll that epilepsy exacts on roommates, friends, and family. He admits to lots of fear and guilt. At one point, he seriously considers suicide by overdosing. Everyday life is hardly ever ordinary: “Now I was scared every day, checking where I stood for dangers, wondering when consciousness would disappear” (p157). A large section of his account details the discrimination he encounters at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in the early 1980’s. The school dismisses him because of his uncontrolled epilepsy. He successfully fights their decision and returns to graduate. Obtaining and holding a job is complicated by his illness, but Eichenwald becomes a journalist who works for the New York Times.

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The Big Sick

Showalter, Michael

Last Updated: Dec-03-2018

Jiang, Joshua

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Kumail Nanjiani is a Pakistani-born American living and working in Chicago. In addition to driving for the ride-sharing company Uber, Kumail performs as a stand-up comic at a local club, hoping to be noticed and land a big break. During one of his shows, he meets a graduate student named Emily Gardner, and the two quickly develop an intimate relationship.

Kumail hides his relationship from his family, because they insist that he only date Pakistani women. Privately, Kumail struggles not only with the cultural expectation of intra-ethnic marriage, but also with other aspects of his heritage, such as devotion to Islamic religious law. He chooses to maintain appearances out of love for his family and fear of disownment. Emily eventually discovers Kumail’s double life and in anger, ends their relationship.

Kumail and Emily’s estrangement is interrupted when Emily is hospitalized with a mysterious illness. Emily initially resists Kumail’s presence, but her sickness worsens and she is placed in a medically-induced coma. Under these increasingly uncertain circumstances, Kumail partners with Beth and Terry—Emily’s parents—to navigate a confusing medical system and chart the best course of care for Emily. The three of them clash over their differing perspectives on care and their interpersonal relationships. As he waits with bated breath for Emily’s recovery, Kumail is forced to confront his values and decide whether his desire to please his family and his ongoing affection for Emily can coexist harmoniously.

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Histories

Guglani, Sam

Last Updated: Sep-18-2018

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Collection (Short Stories)

Summary:

One British hospital. Seven days and nights. Plenty of perspectives from those who work there, train there, and are treated there. Over the course of one week (October 24 thru October 30), the characters in these connected stories spill their secrets and shame, tout their triumphs and tragedies. And the danger of professional and emotional exhaustion looms very large: "Maybe this is how doctors and nurses finally burn out. Past their failures, their hours, all their inhaled sadness" (p40). What ultimately triggers burnout is "the accrued weight of so many tiny things" (p41).

Readers are privy to the thoughts and sometimes nuanced actions of medical personnel - attending physicians, residents, a medical student, and nurses. The musings of a hospital chaplain, cleaning woman, medical secretary, hospital porter, and patients (a hairdresser and a farmer) are also divulged. But the protagonist is the hospital. More than a physical structure, it is a kind of human hive with many strata of workers, occupants, and those (MD's) at the top. The hospital is portrayed as "a place of brokenness," propped up with occasional promises of hope and the might of technology. But decay can be insidious as some physicians no longer appear capable of compassion or empathy.

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The Comet's Tail: A Memoir of No Memory

Nawrocki, Amy

Last Updated: Aug-02-2018

Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

When poet and writer Amy Nawrocki was nineteen years old, a college student returning home after her freshmen year, she suffered a sudden and mysterious illness. She was transformed, in an eye-blink, from an active young woman to a bed bound and comatose patient. "There is nothing to embellish--I got sick, I fell into a deep sleep, I woke up. No fairy tale" (page 3). Months of her life went missing: this brief and lovely memoir is her attempt to reconstruct those hours and those experiences. She begins with reflections on journal entries written before her illness began, giving the reader (and herself) a persona, a personality, a living breathing young woman who already writes, who lives in her head, and who always felt "totally comfortable" in her body (page 3). Then we lose her, as she lost herself. She re-visions the story of her months of suffering and recovering from encephalitic coma through the various medical records and family memories she gathers in order to reconstruct the missing pieces of her life. "The coma girl has detached herself from me. I have to dream her up or rely on what others saw, eye witnesses who had to detach themselves in a different way" (page 21). Coming back into life after a serious illness is a strange and often prolonged journey. Nawrocki writes, "Waking up took as long as sleeping" (page 33). And in this waking up time, she begins to see who she was (or how she looked to others) during those blank months. "The images still frighten me. My face was a mess; hair cropped short, puffed up without styling, ragged, like I just woke up. My eyes seemed empty but weirdly wild" (page 35). During her recovery, the author begins journaling again. "In my college notes, I focused on the art of reflection; after the illness, I wanted mainly to observe" (page 42). And in recovery, she begins to build memories once again. She lists her recollections during weeks in rehab, and she remembers "the final trip home, a cake decorated with blue and yellow icing waiting for me" (page 45).

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It's All Right--He Only Died

Chandler, Raymond

Last Updated: Apr-27-2018

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Short Story

Summary:

The Strand Magazine is a source for “unpublished works by literary masters.” The October-February (2017-2018) issue includes a Raymond Chandler short story that has never before been published. Chandler wrote crime fiction for the most part, and the stories usually involved the fictional detective Phillip Marlowe. This story, however, written between 1956 and 1958, centered on how American health care fails people who need it when they can’t pay for it or look like they can’t pay for it.

In this story, a man who has been hit by a truck is brought into the emergency department at “General Hospital.” He arrives just before shift change and so the admitting clerk is already annoyed. The clerk checks the patient’s pockets for the required $50 deposit and finds nothing, so she could now send the patient to the county hospital, and that would be that. But, before she initiates the transfer, she asks a passing private attending physician to look at the patient. He sees that the patient is dirty, smells of alcohol, and would cost a lot to work up. Mindful of an admonition from a major donor that the “hospital is not run for charity,” the physician surmises the patient is “just drunk,” and agrees the patient should be moved to the county hospital. So off the patient goes.

The next day, the same admitting clerk at General Hospital gets a call from the county hospital. She’s informed that the patient they transferred had a head injury requiring surgery, and that the patient had $4,000 in a money belt inside his undershirt. The patient couldn’t be saved, however, because of the delay involved in the transfer to the county hospital. It’s all right—he only died.

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One Crimson Thread

O’Siadhail, Micheal

Last Updated: Apr-19-2018

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poetry

The Dark Flood Rises

Drabble, Margaret

Last Updated: Apr-09-2018

McEntyre, Marilyn

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

So Much For That

Shriver, Lionel

Last Updated: Jan-18-2018

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Fiction

Genre: Novel

Summary:

The book opens with Shep Knacker packing his bags for his long-dreamed of “Afterlife”—his word for retirement—in Pemba, an island off the coast of Tanzania. He plans to take his wife, Glynis, and his high school aged son, Zach. This plan is not unexpected because Shep and Glynis have made many “research” trips during their 26-year marriage to find the right place (though never to Pemba). But, there were always reasons not to act on their research. An intervention was needed. Glynis is not home while he is packing because she is at some “appointment.” When she gets home, Shep informs her of his plans for the three of them to leave for Pemba, and he further informs Glynis that he’s going whether she comes or not. In response, she informs him that she has cancer—a bad one (mesothelioma); he unpacks, so much for that.

What unfurls from there is more complicated than just the challenges Glynis’s disease produces, though these are monumental challenges. Other people, too, are in need of Shep’s attention. His father’s decrepitude is advancing, his sister is on the brink of homelessness, and his teenage son is detaching from him and life in general. Shep eventually loses his job as an employee at the handyman company he once owned (“Knack of All Trades”) then sold to fund his Afterlife. There’s more.

Shep's best friend, Jackson, who also worked with him at Knack of All Trades has two girls, and one of them has familial dysautonomia. This progressive genetic disease of the nervous system produces a constellation of medical problems that are bizarre, intense, and serious, before it ultimately produces a tragic end. The trauma and tragedy this disease inflicts in this story (and in life) encompass the entire family, in spite of the heroic efforts of Jackson’s wife, Carol.

The many plot lines in this novel at times proceed independently of one another, and at other times intersect. They concern serious illness experiences and the effects they have on families and also how the American health care system can place burdens on those who need it. Nevertheless, the two families, beaten down by illness, fatigued from encounters with doctors and hospitals, and exasperated from fights with insurance companies, rally enough to make it to Pemba. The trip becomes financially affordable as the result of some narrative gimmickry involving a financial settlement of $800,000 from the company that put asbestos in equipment Glynis had used years before. They would spend the rest of their lives there, longer for some than for others.

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Calcedonies

Nisker, Jeffrey

Last Updated: Jan-17-2018

Duffin, Jacalyn

Primary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Play

Summary:

The play has two characters: Ruth and Friend (who is a male doctor).Ruth is an engaging, straight-talking quadriplegic who can zip and dance with her chin-operated wheelchair and takes delight in terrorizing medical staff both physically and verbally. She wants to write poetry and is waiting for a device to make it possible for her to use a computer. She keeps developing bedsores that threaten her life and require long admissions to the hospital before they will heal. She desperately wants to live no matter what happens, as she feels that having no mind would be worse than having no body.Friend is a male doctor with children who is ashamed of having examined her while she was unaware. Burdened with his guilt, he asks to be her “friend.” Ruth is skeptical and runs circles around him, but eventually comes to trust him and believe in his sincerity.She makes him a witness to her advance directive to instigate all heroic measures, as she is afraid of the kindly "ethical" and cost-effective arguments not to treat the disabled. But Ruth dies horribly from sepsis, and Friend is helpless to prevent it. She never obtains the device that would have allowed her to put her poems into printed words.

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