Critical Senses
Do you hear what I hear? / The humming of machines, / which can’t breathe, / but enable artificial ventilation for living beings.
Do you hear what I hear? / The humming of machines, / which can’t breathe, / but enable artificial ventilation for living beings.
Dance has always been a medium for me to express my emotions. It makes me feel alive and helps me process my experiences, including that with imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome has been described as feelings of self-doubt, especially in high achieving people
she is curled on her side like a child / eyes closed, back exposed.
Physicians give their heart and soul to the practice of medicine. Caring for patients at their most vulnerable moments is a heavy responsibility and privilege that medical professionals must carry.
This is a reimagination of anatomy from the outside in.
‘Write Rx’ is a narrative medicine column offering ‘prescriptions’ for narrative medicine exercises. Each column entry begins with an introduction to the theme of the entry, offers literary excerpts to expand on that theme and concludes with questions that invite students to explore a corresponding narrative medicine topic. The goal is to offer space for reflection for busy medical students, as well as foster medical students’ communication toolkit in the increasingly complex space of patient care. Topics include cultural fluency, illness cognitions and more.
There is a straight line from / ordering an ultrasound to obtaining / clear cylinders of red blood cells.
My attention swung back and forth between my mom, my screen and the pairs of eyes periodically peering into the hospital room. I focused on the next question on my screen. Another patient had expired as if they were a carton of milk left too long in the fridge.
Simply put, the humanities seek to capture the mosaic of human existence across the chasms of jubilation and despair, life and death, love and fear. The humanities are both disciplines of academic study and modes of expression.
Screams. Tears. Despair. / A sense of sadness in the atmosphere.
Every medical student has felt apprehensive about facing death at some point, right? Maybe you have experienced someone dying before, or maybe it is something you have never seen and only rarely contemplated. Regardless, there is a subtle tension lurking during your first two years of pre-clinical studies, during which disease and death are intellectualized and abstract. Then clerkships start.
Nita Chen, MD, movement disorders fellow at the Normal Fixel Institute for Neurological Disease, contributes this graphic medicine piece as a former in-Training writer, editor, columnist and featured artist for our print book in-Training: Stories from Tomorrow’s Physicians, Volume 2.