The Arrow Tree: Healing from Long COVID

Weliver, Phyllis

Last Updated: May-18-2021

Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The title of this memoir derives from the Native American custom of bending a tree’s growth in order to indicate a direction of safe passage. The custom represents a reverent cooperation with nature through which a compassionate communication is accomplished: a message to other journeying souls as to how they might find a way to their flourishing. The title is exquisitely apt for this memoir, which echoes the gesture of the arrow tree, testifying to a safe passage through the wilderness of COVID. The author, a first-rate, published Victorian scholar, contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 upon her return from a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, which was cut short as a result of the pandemic.

Weliver has suffered from symptoms ever since: hers is the experience of living with long COVID. The condition warrants her taking a leave from her university, and she returns to her childhood home of Interlochen, in northern Michigan. Her living in and engaging with the natural world there encourages her to undertake meditations about that world and her place in it as she lives with her illness. The writing—the foundational means of her healing—inclines her, crucially, to think with the stories of the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Anishinaabek ("Original Man") of the region, which she researches as a means of deepening her understanding of her home, her origins, and the nature of her identity. Her quest for understanding turns not only to these stories, but to an integration of them with the wisdom of other guides in her life: authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods, poets and thinkers of Taoism and other ancient Eastern philosophies, mentors in her rich journey of studying both literature and music (she attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, Oberlin, where she double-degreed in English Literature and Voice (Music), Cambridge, and the University of Sussex), and her own family, particularly her mother. Her prose is accessible and welcoming, not at all the erudite sort one might anticipate from a reputable scholar: it invites curiosity and encourages insight that is, at times, breathtaking and joyous. This “arrow tree” memoir points its readers in the direction of a safe passage to the home of our natural world, where, in finding union with that world, we may experience healing not only from COVID but from habits of the heart that have left us more broken than we know.

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The Father

Zeller, Florian

Last Updated: Apr-26-2021

Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

The basic plot of The Father mirrors the all-too-common trajectory people with dementia follow: first they deny any problems; then they progressively need more in-home assistance; and then they require institutionalization. This scenario, however, gets obscured when watching the film’s main character—the father—wrestle with quotidian activities and familiar faces. The viewers wrestle with him, and become just as confused and rattled. Florian Zeller, the screenwriter and director, admits he wants viewers feeling what people with dementia feel. He succeeds in the movie as he succeeded in the Broadway play version preceding it.

The father, Anthony, lived in his London flat with help from hired caregivers and his daughter, Anne, who lived nearby. After Anthony banished several caregivers on grounds they were unnecessary, Anne moves him into her flat, and when he’s too much for her there, she moves him to a nursing home. We’re never quite sure, though. Zeller makes the two flats and the nursing home look almost identical. He changes Anne’s story at different times: she’s still married after ten years; she’s been divorced for five years; she’s relocating to Paris with a lover; she was never relocating to Paris; she relocated to Paris. Anne appears as a different person on occasion and the husband she may or may never had appears as different people. Zeller overlays these confusing surroundings and events by jumping forward and backward in time, and repeating some scenes with slight variations. Eventually, Anthony says, “strange things are going on around us.” Viewers will feel the same, and that’s the point.

The movie ends as Anthony awakes in his nursing home room. Just as we are lured into thinking we have returned to the common dementia trajectory at its end, we see his nurse is the person who had appeared as Anne before, and his room looks like the bedrooms in both his own and Anne’s flats. We wonder.

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Parenthesis

Durand, Élodie

Last Updated: Apr-23-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Judith, a French woman in her early twenties, experiences "spells" - episodes of shaking, staring, and sudden memory loss. These spells occur daily and her behavior becomes erratic. She visits a neurologist. He diagnoses epileptic seizures and prescribes medication. Yet the convulsions continue so Judith's drug dose is upped and an MRI of the brain is done.

The MRI scan finds a small tumor that appears inoperable. A brain biopsy reveals an astrocytoma. Judith's life now revolves around her illness and the medical monitoring of it. Time feels distorted, and she likens her seizures to "a little death." Everyday life becomes blurred. She is advised to see a neuropsychiatrist. Her parents worry about her constantly.

Eventually Judith is referred for Gamma Knife radiosurgery. Eighteen months after the procedure is completed, only a tiny scar at the site of the tumor remains. Three years following the treatment, the seizures are gone. She rediscovers the joy of life and embraces a hopeful future.

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Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

Koven, Suzanne

Last Updated: Feb-26-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Collection (Essays)

Summary:

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Koven contemplates some unique challenges confronting female physicians: discrimination, sexism, lower annual salary on average than male counterparts, possible pregnancy and motherhood. She recalls her medical school and residency experience, describes her internal medicine practice, and highlights her role as a daughter, spouse, and mother.

Worry is a theme that works its way into many phases of Koven's life and chapters of this book. The opening one, "Letter to a Young Female Physician," introduces self-doubt and concerns of inadequacy regarding her clinical competence. "Imposter syndrome" is the term she assigns to this fear of fraudulence (that she is pretending to be a genuine, qualified doctor). She worries about her elderly parents, her children, patients, and herself. Over time, she learns to cope with the insecurity that plagues both her professional and personal life.

Some of these essays are especially emotional. "We Have a Body" dwells on the difficult subject of dying, spotlighting a 27-year-old woman who is 27 weeks pregnant and diagnosed with adenocarcinoma of the lung. "Mom at Bedside, Appears Calm" chronicles the author's terror when her young son experiences grand mal seizures and undergoes multiple brain surgeries for the tumor causing them.

Listening emerges as the most important part of a doctor's job. Koven encourages all doctors to utilize their "own personal armamentarium" which might include gentleness, exemplary communication skills, a light sense of humor, or unwavering patience. She fully endorses a concept articulated by another physician-writer, Gavin Francis: "Medicine is an alliance of science and kindness" (p228).

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Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors & Patients

Pearl, Robert

Last Updated: Feb-07-2021

Miksanek, Tony

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Essay

Summary:

Pearl, a plastic surgeon and former CEO of a large medical group, writes powerfully and poignantly about the major role of physician culture - the customs and rituals, traits and beliefs of doctors. This culture is entrenched through years of medical training. He decides that physician culture "can be both a virtuous force and an equally destructive influence" (p70).

Some of that culture is readily on display: attire, tools of the trade, unique medical terminology, insensitive humor, frequent handwashing. Positive aspects of physician culture include self-confidence, integrity, compassion, and selflessness. Negative elements are ingrained to keep emotions and dread at bay: detachment, callousness, denial. This culture of medicine must navigate dual interests - healing (the mission of medicine) and profit (income, status, prestige).

Pearl suggests an evolutionary pathway for physician culture that he dubs "the five C's of Cultural Change" - confront, commit, connect, collaborate, contribute. He tackles issues of sexism, racism, and elitism in American healthcare. He explores the suffering of physicians and their need to seek forgiveness - often secretly and even in cases of perceived "failure" when everything possible was done correctly. His discussion is filled with agonizing, frustrating, and loving stories about patients, family members, and colleagues (including physician suicide).

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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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The Talking Cure: New and Selected Poems

Coulehan, Jack

Last Updated: Sep-10-2020

Kohn, Martin

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

The Talking Cure is Jack Coulehan’s 11th book, seven of which, including this collection, are books of his poetry. This collection begins with selected works from his six previous books of poetry and continues with a selection of poems in the imagined voice of Chekhov. These sections are followed by previously uncollected poems, and the book ends with 25 new poems reflecting the title of this book--“The Talking Cure”. The poems represent multiple viewpoints—patients, caregivers, family members as they struggle to make sense of the vicissitudes—and unexpected joys—in life. The poems have appeared over the past four decades in medical journals (primarily Annals of Internal Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association) and in many literary journals including Prairie Schooner and Negative Capability Press.

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Losing Thomas & Ella: A Father's Story

Weaver-Hightower, Marcus

Last Updated: Aug-23-2020

DiLeonardo, Olivia

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction — Secondary Category: Literature /

Genre: Graphic Memoir

Summary:

Dr. Weaver-Hightower wrote, illustrated, and published this powerful graphic work in the Journal of Medical Humanities. The comic itself is presented in a traditional paneled format, with a few exceptions, and rendered in a moody ink wash in black, white, and various shades of darker and lighter greys. The story is told in the authentic, sometimes faltering voice, of the father of Thomas and Ella, a pair of twin infants who died at 22 and 24 weeks into pregnancy. Beginning with their harrowing trip to the hospital, the comic describes the father and mother’s loss of Ella, shortly after she was born prematurely; their subsequent wait for Thomas to reach the “viable” age of 24 weeks; his stillbirth; and the couple’s sudden discharge from the hospital, going home with “empty arms”. The story then transitions into “The Long After”, including the funeral and the phases of the parents’ grieving process. The father describes his grief, frustrations, the couple’s differing ways of coping, and his ambivalence and anger toward religion as a source of comfort or deeper understanding. On the last page, he recounts their hopes and fears as they enter into their second pregnancy, concluding with panels of the father wrestling with how to understand and process this loss. The final panel is an image of the father in profile, expressionless, saying nothing, a fitting conclusion to a story for which words seem to fail.

With this piece, the author introduces us to the genre of the “research comic”. The comic is followed by a methodological appendix, which explains the author’s process for choosing, capturing, and relating this history in words and illustrations, as well as his rationale for selecting a comic or graphic memoir format for the piece. The author also elaborates upon the concept of the comic as a form of “rigorous, informative research” (226). The appendix is very interesting and will satisfy the curiosity of readers asking the questions, “How did he do this?”, or “Why is this story a comic?”, but the piece stands on its own without the appendix, as well.

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Hidden Valley Road

Kolker, Robert

Last Updated: Jun-15-2020

Glass, Guy

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Biography

Summary:

The Galvins of Hidden Valley Road, just outside Colorado Springs, appear to be the kind of wholesome, all-American family that others might envy. The tragic fact is that six of the twelve children go on to develop schizophrenia, a situation that is practically unprecedented. In Hidden Valley Road, journalist Robert Kolker gives us the tale of the deterioration of six afflicted children and the traumatization of six healthy ones in an improbable, bucolic setting. As one after the other reaches young adulthood in this “funhouse-mirror reflection of the American dream” (p. xxi) and inexorably succumbs to madness, the family struggles to cope.

In their search for answers, the Galvins’s extraordinary circumstances come to the attention of researchers. Ultimately, although there is no cure, the family makes a contribution through their genes to our understanding of schizophrenia, as a mutation is discovered that is shared by the afflicted children.

Hidden Valley Road follows the travails of this “multiplex schizophrenia” family over so many years that there is a sea change in our understanding of the disease’s origins. At first, it is taken for granted to be the result of a faulty upbringing at the hands of “schizophrenogenic” parents. Later, biological explanations prevail. Finally, a more balanced view is attained, with nature and nurture each thought to play a role.

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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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