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Tag: hope

And What Is Beautiful

if not a healing wound?
toes missing, trans-metatarsal amputation,
remaining tissue puckering deep pink:
raw beauty in disfigurement.

He shows me pictures on his cell phone,
the toes felt doused with molten metal.
Before debridement: brown-black,
the foot decaying like a leaf in winter.

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Depressed

Ronna Edelstein ~

Announce to friends that you have cancer, and they will probably react with sympathy and compassion. Tell them that you’ve broken your leg, and they’ll offer to get your groceries and drive you to medical appointments.

Share that you suffer from depression–and the sound of silence will fill your head.

Depression has been my companion for as long as I can remember. My maternal grandmother, who immigrated to this

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First Combat, Then Conversation

 
2010: I’m a 25-year-old premedical student, an herbalist and a volunteer at a free clinic. I’m experiencing unaccountable fatigue, achiness, brain fog and dizziness. After a series of medical evaluations, I receive a dreaded diagnosis–Lyme disease, the same infection that crippled my mother, that I now feel twisting my body and contorting my mind. I am infected with terror.
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The Afterworld

 
 
Clementine King
 
About the artist: 
 
“Clementine King” is an assistant professor of public health and an artist. 
 
About the artwork: 
 
“This graffiti scene struck me as I made my way through a tough day with depression. It must have been created by multiple artists, at different times, with different intentions. But taken together, at this moment, was there a message in it? The peaceful world above, the chaos

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The Turkeys

Lou arrived alone when she’d come for her blood pressure and itchy skin. Sharp, funny, she told me of her daughters, grown up and far away, and her life in the neighborhood as it changed around her. She had lived there for decades, long after her husband left, long after raising two on her own, long after the cottages around her were torn down for industrial sites. Neighbors were scarce and stray dogs plenty.

When

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Halfway Home

I met Terry the day after he sat in the back of a pick-up, joyriding on a busy interstate. A big rig whooshed by, sucked Terry out of the truck bed and slammed him into the side of the semi-trailer before he fell back into the truck. One scalp laceration and a few facial scrapes presented evidence of the accident. The damage occurred inside Terry’s head.
 
It shames me to admit I practiced the defense mechanism

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How Did He Just Wake Up?

I hung up the phone in shock. I never felt so helpless.

My brother was lying in a deep coma in a Bronx hospital, and none of his nine siblings were in America. My parents were dead, and the closest relative was my mom’s brother who lived in Canada. He had already booked a flight to New York for the same night.

Sitting in a village in Saudi Arabia, where I worked as a community

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Hope Lost

In 2004, Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic Convention. He entitled it “The Audacity of Hope.” At the time, as a wide-eyed, innocent medical student who had just finished her third-year clerkships, I wondered if the medical profession had not only lost this audacity but, furthermore, if we discouraged our patients from “the audacity of hope.”

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mimiandgrace hwang

Comfort

 Esther Hwang

About the artist: 

Esther Hwang is a second-year medical student at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. “I take occasional photos when the beauty of life captures my heart. I spend most of my days studying and learning more about being a physician. I am interested in pursuing family medicine and obstetrics. On

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Medical School

We came to the one place I knew you dreaded.
 
 As joyful as you sounded when you called me at work after you plucked the envelope – a big envelope this time – from our mailbox, I knew our happiness lay in the expectation that other oversized bundles would follow. For it to truly be our happiness, our dream, we would need to rejoice at this triumph, then file it away and ultimately go

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Searching for My Superpower

My name is Tamara, and I have a blood cancer, Polycythemia Vera, which means in my bone marrow, the essence of my being, I have a mutation. Like the X-Men, only I have yet to discover my superpower.

You see it is freaking rush hour up in here. Too many red blood cells and platelets and not enough neurotransmitters or oxygen, and what this means is I feel like the life and the person I

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Hope in a Hopeless Place

 
In 2008 my father was committed to a long-term care facility, and our family visited him daily. We testified to the nursing home staff of the funny, smart, kind and generous man he once was.
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