It’s hard to believe it, but #MedHumChat has been going strong for over 2 years now. Over this stretch of time we’ve been thrilled to welcome new faces and voices into our twice monthly gatherings. This week, we are diving into the MHC archives to give our more recent participants a chance to engage with our past content — starting with the pieces from Colleen Farrell’s very first chat. We hope you can join us!
Valerie Gribben: Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work
Selected Excerpts
“… when I started medical school, I packed up my youthful literary indiscretions. I reordered my bookshelf, moving my well-thumbed but now irrelevant Brothers Grimm stories behind a biochemistry textbook. Within weeks my desk was crammed with printouts on fractures of the humerus and the intermediates of oxidative phosphorylation. I was thinking in terms of proximal and distal, instead of hither and thither.”
“The practice of medicine bestows the sacred privilege to ask about the unmentionable. But what happens when the door to Bluebeard’s horror chamber opens, and the bloody secrets spill onto your aseptic field of study? How do you process the pain of your patients?”
“Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.”
Jane O Wayne: Intensive Care
Even the smallest tide
in the silver sea of a thermometer
can turn a ship around.
On that bleak shore,
every ebb and flow was charted.
What else was there to go on? Breathing
and nothing else but breathing—
no more than what an ear can conjure
out of an empty conch.
In such a storm, we might have been villagers
waiting for a lost ship.
We could never rest.
Which is worse then—waves beating
on an empty beach or the throbs of that device
working for your heart?
For months, it went on: no let up,
no north star in that blank sky—
only nods, grimaces,
your open eyes taunting us, like some word
on the tip of the tongue
one agonizes to recall but can’t.
Day after day, on the same narrow coast,
we stood guard, waiting
for some speck to reappear, for the wind
to give a different verdict.
To get through the nights,
we let the flat horizon hypnotize us.